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Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850.

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Title: Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850.

Author: Various


        
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HARPER'S

NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.

No. III.--AUGUST, 1850.--VOL. I.




[Illustration: SIR THOMAS MORE.]

[From the Art-Journal.]

PILGRIMAGE TO THE HOME OF SIR THOMAS MORE.

BY MRS. S. C. HALL.


While living in the neighborhood of Chelsea, we determined to look upon
the few broken walls that once inclosed the residence of Sir Thomas
More, a man who, despite the bitterness inseparable from a persecuting
age, was of most wonderful goodness as well as intellectual power. We
first read over the memories of him preserved by Erasmus, Hoddesdon,
Roper, Aubrey, his own namesake, and others. It is pleasant to muse over
the past; pleasant to know that much of malice and bigotry has departed,
to return no more, that the prevalence of a spirit which could render
even Sir Thomas More unjust and, to seeming, cruel, is passing away.
Though we do implicitly believe there would be no lack of great hearts,
and brave hearts, at the present day, if it were necessary to bring them
to the test, still there have been few men like unto him. It is a
pleasant and a profitable task, so to sift through past ages, so to
separate the wheat from the chaff, to see, when the feelings of party
and prejudice sink to their proper insignificance, how the morally great
stands forth in its own dignity, bright, glorious, and everlasting. St.
Evremond sets forth the firmness and constancy of Petronius Arbiter in
his last moments, and imagines he discovers in them a softer nobility
of mind and resolution, than in the deaths of Seneca, Cato, or Socrates
himself; but Addison says, and we can not but think truly, "that if he
was so well pleased with gayety of humor in a dying man, he might have
found a much more noble instance of it in Sir Thomas More, who died upon
a point of religion, and is respected as a martyr by that side for which
he suffered." What was pious philosophy in this extraordinary man, might
seem frenzy in any one who does not resemble him as well in the
cheerfulness of his temper as in the sanctity of his life and manners.

Oh, that some such man as he were to sit upon our woolsack now; what
would the world think, if when the mighty oracle commanded the next
cause to come on, the reply should be, "_Please your good lordship,
there is no other!_" Well might the smart epigrammatist write:

    When MORE some time had chancellor been,
      No MORE suits did remain;
    The same shall never MORE be seen,
      Till MORE be there again!

We mused over the history of his time until we slept, and dreamed: and
first in our dream we saw a fair meadow, and it was sprinkled over with
white daisies, and a bull was feeding therein; and as we looked upon him
he grew fatter and fatter, and roared in the wantonness of power and
strength, so that the earth trembled; and he plucked the branches off
the trees, and trampled on the ancient inclosures of the meadow, and as
he stormed, and bellowed, and destroyed, the daisies became human heads,
and the creature flung them about, and warmed his hoofs in the hot blood
that flowed from them and we grew sick and sorry at heart, and thought,
is there no one to slay the destroyer? And when we looked again, the
Eighth Harry was alone in the meadow; and, while many heads were lying
upon the grass, some kept perpetually bowing before him, while others
sung his praises as wise, just, and merciful. Then we heard a trumpet
ringing its scarlet music through the air, and we stood in the old
tilt-yard at Whitehall, and the pompous Wolsey, the bloated king, the
still living Holbein, the picturesque Surrey, the Aragonian Catharine,
the gentle Jane, the butterfly Anne Bullen, the coarse-seeming but
wise-thinking Ann of Cleves the precise Catherine Howard, and the stout
hearted Catherine Parr, passed us so closely by, that we could have
touched their garments; then a bowing troop of court gallants came on;
others whose names and actions you may read of in history; and then the
hero of our thoughts, Sir Thomas More--well dressed, for it was a time
of pageants--was talking somewhat apart to his pale-faced friend
Erasmus, while "Son Roper," as the chancellor loved to call his
son-in-law, stood watchfully and respectfully a little on one side. Even
if we had never seen the pictures Holbein painted of his first patron,
we should have known him by the bright benevolence of his aspect, the
singular purity of his complexion, his penetrating yet gentle eyes, and
the incomparable grandeur with which virtue and independence dignified
even an indifferent figure. His smile was so catching that the most
broken-hearted were won by it to forget their sorrows; and his voice,
low and sweet though it was, was so distinct, that we heard it above all
the coarse jests, loud music, and trumpet calls of the vain and idle
crowd. And while we listened, we awoke; resolved next day to make our
pilgrimage, perfectly satisfied at the outset, that though no fewer than
four houses in Chelsea contend for the honor of his residence, Doctor
King's arguments in favor of the site being the same as that of Beaufort
House--upon the greater part of which now stands Beaufort-row--are the
most conclusive; those who are curious in the matter can go and see his
manuscripts in the British Museum. Passing Beaufort-row, we proceeded
straight on to the turn leading to the Chelsea _Clock-house_.

[Illustration: CLOCK HOUSE.]

It is an old, patched-up, rickety dwelling, containing, perhaps, but few
of the original stones, yet interesting as being the lodge-entrance to
the offices of Beaufort-House; remarkable, also, as the dwelling of a
family of the name of Howard, who have occupied it for more than a
hundred years, the first possessor being gardener to Sir Hans Sloane,
into whose possession, after a lapse of years, and many changes, a
portion of Sir Thomas More's property had passed. This Howard had skill
in the distilling of herbs and perfumes, which his descendant carries on
to this day. We lifted the heavy brass knocker, and were admitted into
the "old clock-house." The interior shows evident marks of extreme age,
the flooring being ridgy and seamed, bearing their marks with a
discontented creaking, like the secret murmurs of a faded beauty against
her wrinkles! On the counter stood a few frost-bitten geraniums, and
drawers, containing various roots and seeds, were ranged round the
walls, while above them were placed good stout quart and pint bottles of
distilled waters. The man would have it that the "clock-house" was the
"real original" lodge-entrance to "Beaufort House;" and so we agreed it
might have been, but not, "_perhaps_" built during Sir Thomas More's
lifetime. To this insinuation he turned a deaf ear, assuring us that his
family, having lived there so long, must know all about it, and that the
brother of Sir Hans Sloane's gardener had made the great clock in old
Chelsea Church, as the church books could prove. "You can, if you
please," he said, "go under the archway at the side of this house,
leading into the Moravian chapel and burying-ground, where the notice,
that 'within are the Park-chapel Schools,' is put up." And that is quite
true; the Moravians now only use the chapel which was erected in their
burying-ground to perform an occasional funeral service in, and so they
"let it" to the infant school. The burying-ground is very pretty in the
summer time. Its space occupies only a small portion of the chancellor's
garden; part of its walls are very old, and the south one certainly
belonged to Beaufort House. There have been some who trace out a Tudor
arch and one or two Gothic windows as having been filled up with more
modern mason-work: but that may be fancy. There seems no doubt that the
Moravian chapel stands on the site of the old stables.

"Then," we said, "the clock-house could only have been at the entrance
to the offices." The man looked for a moment a little hurt at this
observation, as derogatory to the dignity of his dwelling, but he
smiled, and said. "Perhaps so;" and very good-naturedly showed us the
cemetery of this interesting people. Indeed, their original settlement
in Chelsea is quite a romance. The chapel stands to the left of the
burying-ground, which is entered by a primitive wicket-gate; it forms a
square of thick grass, crossed by broad gravel walks, kept with the
greatest neatness The tombstones are all that, and the graves not
raised above the level of the sward. They are of two sizes only: the
larger for grown persons, the smaller for children. The inscriptions on
the grave-stones, in general, seldom record more than the names and ages
of the persons interred. The men are buried in one division, the women
in another. We read one or two of the names, and they were quaint and
strange: "Anne Rypheria Hurloch;" "Anna Benigna La Trobe;" and one was
especially interesting, James Gillray, forty years sexton to this simple
cemetery, and father of Gillray, the H. B. of the past century. One
thing pleased us mightily, the extreme old age to which the dwellers in
this house seemed to have attained.

A line of ancient trees runs along the back of the narrow gardens of
Milman's-row, which is parallel with, but further from town than
Beaufort-row, and affords a grateful shade in the summer time. We
resolved to walk quietly round, and then enter the chapel. How strange
the changes of the world! The graves of a simple, peace-loving,
unambitious people were lying around us, and yet it was the place which
Erasmus describes as "Sir Thomas More's estate, purchased at Chelsey,"
and where "he built him a house, neither mean nor subject to envy, yet
magnificent and commodious enough." How dearly he loved this place, and
how much care he bestowed upon it, can be gathered from the various
documents still extant.[1] The bravery with which, soon after he was
elected a burgess to parliament, he opposed a subsidy demanded by Henry
the Seventh, with so much power that he won the parliament to his
opinion, and incensed the king so greatly, that, out of revenge, he
committed the young barrister's father to the Tower, and fined him in
the fine of a hundred pounds! That bravery remained with him to the
last, and with it was mingled the simplicity which so frequently and so
beautifully blends with the intellectuality that seems to belong to a
higher world than this. When he "took to marrying," he fancied the
second daughter of a Mr. Colt, a gentleman of Essex; yet when he
considered the pain it must give the eldest to see her sister preferred
before her, he gave up his first love, and framed his fancy to the
elder. This lady died, after having brought him four children; but his
second choice, Dame Alice, has always seemed to us a punishment and a
sore trial. And yet how beautifully does Erasmus describe his mode of
living in this very place: "He converseth with his wife, his son, his
daughter-in-law, his three daughters and their husbands, with eleven
grandchildren. There is not a man living so affectionate to his children
as he. He loveth his old wife as if she were a young maid; he persuadeth
her to play on the lute, and so with the like gentleness he ordereth his
family. Such is the excellence of his temper, that whatsoever happeneth
that could not be helped, he loveth, as if nothing could have happened
more happily. You would say there was in that place Plato's academy; but
I do his house an injury in comparing it to Plato's academy, where there
were only disputations of numbers and geometrical figures, and sometimes
of moral virtues. I should rather call his house a school or university
of Christian religion; for, though there is none therein but readeth and
studyeth the liberal sciences, their special care is piety and
virtue."[2]

[Illustration: MORE'S HOUSE.]

The king was used to visit his "beloved chancellor" here for days
together to admire his terrace overhanging the Thames, to row in his
state barge, to ask opinions upon divers matters, and it is said that
the royal answer to Luther was composed under the chancellor's revising
eye. Still, the penetrating vision of Sir Thomas was in no decree
obscured by this glitter. One day the king came unexpectedly to Chelsea,
and having dined, walked with Sir Thomas for the space of an hour, in
the garden, having his arm about his neck. We pleased ourselves with the
notion that they walked where then we stood! Well might such
condescension cause his son Roper--for whom he entertained so warm an
affection--to congratulate his father upon such condescension, and to
remind him that he had never seen his majesty approach such familiarity
with any one, save once, when he was seen to walk arm in arm with
Cardinal Wolsey. "I thank our Lord," answered Sir Thomas, "I find his
grace my very good lord, indeed; and I do believe, he doth as
singularly love me as any subject within the realm; however, son Roper,
I may tell thee I have no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head
should win him a castle in France, it should not fail to go off."

With the exception of his own family (and his wife formed an exception
here), there are few indeed of his contemporaries, notwithstanding the
eulogiums they are prone to heap upon him, who understood the elevated
and unworldly character of this extraordinary man.

The Duke of Norfolk, coming one day to dine with him, found him in
Chelsea Church, singing in the choir, with his surplice on. "What!
what!" exclaimed the duke, "what, what, my Lord Chancellor a parish
clerk! a parish clerk! you dishonor the king and his office." And how
exquisite his reply, "Nay, you may not think your master and mine will
be offended with me for serving God his master, or thereby count his
office dishonored." Another reply to the same abject noble, is well
graven on our memory. He expostulated with him, like many of his other
friends, for braving the king's displeasure. "By the mass, Master More,"
he said, "it is perilous striving with princes; therefore, I wish you
somewhat to incline to the king's pleasure, for '_indignatio Principis
mors est._'" "And is that all, my lord?" replied this man, so much above
all paltry considerations; "then in good faith the difference between
your grace and me is but this--that I may die to-day, and you
to-morrow."

[Illustration: CHELSEA CHURCH.]

He took great delight in beautifying Chelsea Church, although he had a
private chapel of his own; and when last there they told us the painted
window had been his gift. It must have been a rare sight to see the
chancellor of England sitting with the choir; and yet there was a fair
share of pomp in the manner of his servitor bowing at his lady's pew,
when the service of the mass was ended, and saying, "My lord is gone
_before_." But the day after he resigned the great seal of England (of
which his wife knew nothing), Sir Thomas presented himself at the
pew-door, and, after the fashion of his servitor, quaintly said, "Madam,
my lord is _gone."_ The vain woman could not comprehend his meaning,
which, when, during their short walk home, he fully explained, she was
greatly pained thereby, lamenting it with exceeding bitterness of
spirit.

We fancied we could trace a gothic door or window in the wall; but our
great desire would have been to discover the water-gate from which he
took his departure the morning he was summoned to Lambeth to take the
oath of supremacy. True to what he believed right, he offered up his
prayers and confessions in Chelsea Church, and then, returning to his
own house, took an affectionate farewell of his wife and children,
forbidding them to accompany hum to the water-gate, as was their custom,
fearing, doubtless, that his mighty heart could not sustain a prolonged
interview. Who could paint the silent parting between him and all he
loved so well--the boat waiting at the foot of the stairs--the rowers in
their rich liveries, while their hearts, heavy with apprehension for the
fate of him they served, still trusted that nothing could be found to
harm so good a master--the pale and earnest countenance of "son Roper,"
wondering at the calmness, at such a time, which more than all other
things, bespeaks the master mind. For a moment his hand lingered on the
gate, and in fastening the simple latch his fingers trembled, and then
he took his seat by his son's side; and in another moment the boat was
flying through the waters. For some time he spoke no word, but communed
with and strengthened his great heart by holy thoughts; then looking
straight into his son Roper's eyes, while his own brightened with a
glorious triumph, he exclaimed in the fullness of his rich-toned voice,
"I thank our Lord the field is won." It was no wonder that, overwhelmed
with apprehension, his son-in-law could not apprehend his meaning then,
but afterward bethought him that he signified how he had conquered the
world.

The abbot of Westminster took him that same day into custody, on his
refusal to "take the king as head of his Church;" and upon his repeating
this refusal four days afterward, he was committed to the Tower. Then,
indeed, these heretofore bowers of bliss echoed to the weak and wavering
complaints of his proud wife, who disturbed him also in his prison by
her desires, so vain and so worldly, when compared with the elevated
feelings of his dear daughter Margaret.

How did the fond, foolish woman seek to shake his purpose! "Seeing," she
said, "you have a house at Chelsea, a right fair house, your library,
your gallery, your garden, your orchard, and all other necessaries so
handsome about you, where you might in company with me, your wife, your
children, and household, be merry, I marvel that you who have been
always taken for so wise a man, can be content thus to be shut up among
mice and rats, and, too, when you might be abroad at your liberty, and
with the favor and good-will both of the king and his council, if you
would but do as all the bishops and best learned men of the realm have
done."

And then not even angered by her folly, seeing how little was given her
to understand, he asked her if the house in Chelsea was any nearer
Heaven than the gloomy one he then occupied? ending his pleasant yet
wise parleying with a simple question:

"Tell me," he said, "good Mistress Alice, how long do you think might we
live and enjoy that same house?"

She answered, "Some twenty years."

"Truly," he replied, "if you had said some thousand years, it might have
been somewhat; and yet he were a very bad merchant who would put himself
in danger to lose eternity for a thousand years. How much the rather if
we are not sure to enjoy it one day to an end?"

It is for the glory of women that his daughter Margaret, while she loved
and honored him past all telling, strengthened his noble nature; for,
writing him during his fifteen months' imprisonment in the Tower, she
asks, in words not to be forgotten, "What do you think, most dear
father, doth comfort us at Chelsey, in this your absence? Surely, the
remembrance of your manner of life passed among us--your holy
conversation--your wholesome counsels--your examples of virtue, of which
there is hope that they do not only persevere with you, but that they
are, by God's grace, much more increased."

After the endurance of fifteen months' imprisonment, he was arraigned,
tried, and found guilty of denying the king's supremacy.

Alack! is there no painter of English history bold enough to immortalize
himself by painting this trial? Sir Thomas More was beheaded on Tower
Hill, in the bright sunshine of the month of July, on its fifth day,
1535, the king remitting the disgusting quartering of the quivering
flesh, because of his "high office." When told of the king's "mercy,"
"Now, God forbid," he said, "the king should use anymore such to any of
my friends; and God bless all my posterity from such pardons."

One man of all the crowd who wept at his death, reproached him with a
decision he had given in Chancery. More, nothing discomposed, replied,
that if it were still to do, he would give the same decision. This
happened twelve months before. And, while the last scene was enacting on
Tower-Hill, the king, who had walked in this very garden with his arm
round the neck, which, by his command, the ax had severed, was playing
at Tables in Whitehall, Queen Anne Bullen looking on; and when told that
Sir Thomas More was dead, casting his eyes upon the pretty fool that had
glittered in his pageants, he said, "Thou art the cause of this man's
death." The COWARD! to seek to turn upon a thing so weak as that, the
heavy sin which clung to his own soul!

[Illustration: TOMB.]

Some say the body lies in Chelsea Church, beneath the tomb we have
sketched--the epitaph having been written by himself before he
anticipated the manner of his death.[3] It is too long to insert; but
the lines at the conclusion are very like the man. The epitaph and
poetry are in Latin: we give the translation:

    "For Alice and for Thomas More's remains
    Prepared, this tomb Johanna's form contains
    One, married young; with mutual ardor blest,
    A boy and three fair girls our joy confest.
    The other (no small praise) of these appear'd
    As fond as if by her own pangs endeared.
    One lived with me, one lives in such sweet strife,
    Slight preference could I give to either wife.
    Oh! had it met Heaven's sanction and decree,
    One hallowed bond might have united three;
    Yet still be ours one grave, one lot on high!
    Thus death, what life denied us, shall supply."

[Illustration: ROPER's HOUSE.]

Others tell that his remains were interred in the Tower,[4] and some
record that the head was sought and preserved by that same daughter
Margaret, who caused it to be buried in the family vault of the Ropers
in St. Dunstan's Church, Canterbury;[5] and they add a pretty legend how
that, when his head was upon London Bridge, Margaret would be rowed
beneath it, and, nothing horrified at the sight, say aloud, "That head
has layde many a time in my lappe; would to God, would to God, it would
fall into my lappe as I pass under now," and the head did so fall, and
she carried it in her "lappe" until she placed it in her husband's, "son
Roper's" vault, at Canterbury.

The king took possession of these fair grounds at Chelsea, and all the
chancellor's other property, namely, Dunkington, Trenkford, and Benley
Park, in Oxfordshire, allowing the widow he had made, twenty pounds per
year for her life, and indulging his petty tyranny still more, by
imprisoning Sir Thomas's daughter, Margaret, "both because she kept her
father's head for a relic, and that she meant to set her father's works
in print."

We were calling to mind more minute particulars of the charities and
good deeds of this great man, when, standing at the moment opposite a
grave where some loving hand had planted two standard rose-trees, we
suddenly heard a chant of children's voices, the infant scholars singing
their little hymn; the tune, too, was a well-known and popular melody,
and very sweet, yet sad of sound; it was just such music, as for its
simplicity, would have been welcome to the mighty dead; and, as we
entered among the little songsters, the past faded away, and we found
ourselves speculating on the hopeful present.

       *       *       *       *       *

We close Mrs. Hall's pleasant sketches of Sir Thomas More and his
localities, with a brief description of a scene in his prison, which the
pencil of Mr. Herbert, of the Royal Academy, has beautifully depicted.
It must be remembered that More was a zealous Roman Catholic. He was
committed to the Tower in 1534, by the licentious Henry VIII., partly to
punish him for refusing to assist that monarch in his marriage with
Anne Boleyn, "the pretty fool," as Mrs. Hall calls her; but particularly
because he declined to acknowledge the king's ecclesiastical supremacy
as head of the Reformed Church. There he remained until his execution
the following year. "During his imprisonment," says his son-in-law and
biographer, Roper, who married his favorite daughter Margaret, "one day,
looking from his window, he saw four monks (who also had refused the
oath of supremacy) going to their execution, and regretting that he
could not bear them company, said: 'Look, Megge, dost thou not see that
these blessed fathers be now going as cheerful to their death, as
bridegrooms to their marriage? By which thou may'st see, myne own good
daughter, what a great difference there is between such as have spent
all their days in a religious, hard, and penitential life, and such as
have (as thy poore father hath done) consumed all their time in pleasure
and ease;'" and so he proceeded to enlarge on their merits and
martyrdom. His grandson, Cresacre More, referring to this scene, says,
"By which most humble and heavenly meditation, we may easily guess what
a spirit of charity he had gotten by often meditation, that every sight
brought him new matter to practice most heroical resolutions."

[Illustration: SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS DAUGHTER.]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] After the death of More, this favorite home of his, where he had so
frequently gathered "a choice company of men distinguished by their
genius and learning," passed into the rapacious hands of his bad
sovereign, and by him was presented to Sir William Pawlet, ultimately
Lord High Treasurer and Marquis of Winchester; from his hands it passed
into Lord Dacre's, to whom succeeded Lord Burghley; then followed his
son, the Earl of Salisbury, as its master; from him it passed
successively to the Earl of Lincoln, Sir Arthur Gorges, the Earl of
Middlesex, Villiers duke of Buckingham, Sir Bulstrode Whitelock, the
second Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Bristol, the Duke of Beaufort,
and ultimately to Sir Hans Slonne, who obtained it in 1738, and after
keeping it for two years razed it to the ground; an unhappy want of
reverence on the part of the great naturalist for the home of so many
great men. There is a print of it by J. Knyff, in 1699, which is copied
(p. 292); it shows some old features, but it had then been enlarged and
altered. Erasmus has well described it as it was in More's lifetime. It
had "a chapel, a library, and a gallery, called the New Buildings, a
good distance from his main house, wherein his custom was to busy
himself in prayer and meditation, whensoever he was at leisure."
Heywood, in his _II Moro_ (Florence, 1556), describes "the garden as
wonderfully charming, both from the advantages of its site, for from one
part almost the whole of the noble city of London was visible, and from
the other the beautiful Thames, with green meadows by woody eminences
all around, and also for its own beauty, for it was crowned with an
almost perpetual verdure." At one side was a small green eminence to
command the prospect.

[2] The conduct of this great man's house was a model to all, and as
near an approach to his own Utopia as might well be. Erasmus says, "I
should rather call his house a school or university of Christian
religion, for though there is none therein but readeth and studyeth the
liberal sciences, their special care is piety and virtue; there is no
quarreling or intemperate words heard; none seen idle; which household
discipline that worthy gentleman doth not govern, but with all kind and
courteous benevolence." The servant-men abode on one side of the house,
the women on another, and met at prayer-time, or on church festivals,
when More would read and expound to them. He suffered no cards or dice,
but gave each one his garden-plot for relaxation, or set them to sing or
play music. He had an affection for all who truly served him, and his
daughters' nurse is as affectionately remembered in his letters when
from home as are they themselves. "Thomas More sendeth greeting to his
most dear daughters Margaret, Elizabeth, and Cecily; and to Margaret
Giggs, as dear to him as if she were his own," are his words in one
letter; and his valued and trustworthy domestics appear in the family
pictures of the family by Holbein. They requited his attachment by
truest fidelity and love; and his daughter Margaret, in her last
passionate interview with her father on his way to the Tower, was
succeeded by Margaret Giggs and a maid-servant, who embraced and kissed
their condemned master, "of whom, he said after, it was homely but very
lovingly done." Of these and other of his servants, Erasmus remarks,
"after Sir Thomas More's death, none ever was touched with the least
suspicion of any evil fame."

[3] Wood and Weaver both affirm that the body of More was first
deposited in the Tower Chapel, but was subsequently obtained by his
devoted and accomplished daughter, Margaret Roper, and re-interred in
Chelsea Church, in the tomb he had finished in 1532, the year in which
he had surrendered the chancellorship, and resolved to abide the issue
of his conscientious opposition to the king's wishes, as if he felt that
the tomb should then be prepared.

[4] Faulkner, in his history of Chelsea, adheres to this opinion, and
says that the tomb in that church is but "an empty cenotaph." His
grandson, in his Life, says, "his body was buried in the Chapel of St.
Peter, in the Tower, in the belfry, or, as some say, as one entereth
into the vestry;" and he does not notice the story of his daughter's
re-interment of it elsewhere.

[5] The Ropers lived at Canterbury, in St Dunstan's-street. The house is
destroyed, and a brewery occupies its site; but the picturesque old
gateway, of red brick, still remains, and is engraved above. Margaret
Roper, the noble-hearted, learned, and favorite daughter of More resided
here with her husband, until her death, in 1544, nine years after the
execution of her father, when she was buried in the family vault at St.
Dunstan's, where she had reverently placed the head of her father. The
story of her piety is thus told by Cresacre More, in his life of his
grandfather, Sir Thomas: "His head having remained about a month upon
London Bridge, and being to be cast into the Thames, because room should
be made for divers others, who, in plentiful sort, suffered martyrdom
for the same supremacy, shortly after, it was bought by his daughter
Margaret, lest, as she stoutly affirmed before the council, being called
before them after for the matter, it should be food for fishes; which
she buried, where she thought fittest." Anthony-a-Wood says, that she
preserved it in a leaden box, and placed it in her tomb "with great
devotion;" and in 1715, Dr. Rawlinson told Hearne the antiquary, that he
had seen it there "inclosed in an iron grate." This was fully confirmed
in 1835, when the chancel of the church being repaired, the Roper vault
was opened, and several persons descended into it, and saw the skull in
a leaden box, something like a bee-hive, open in the front, and which
was placed in a square recess, in the wall, with an iron-grating before
it. A drawing was made, which was engraved in the _Gentleman's Magazine_
of May, 1837, which we have copied in our initial letter; Summerly, in
his Handbook to Canterbury, says: "In the print there, however, the
opening in the leaden box, inclosing the head, is made oval, whereas it
should be in the form of a triangle." We have therefore so corrected our
copy.




[From Hunting Adventures in South Africa.]

A BUFFALO CHASE.


Early on the 4th we inspanned and continued our march for Booby, a large
party of savages still following the wagons. Before proceeding far I was
tempted by the beautiful appearance of the country to saddle horses, to
hunt in the mountains westward of my course. I directed the wagons to
proceed a few miles under guidance of the natives, and there await my
arrival. I was accompanied by Isaac, who was mounted on the Old Gray,
and carried my clumsy Dutch rifle of six to the pound. Two Bechuanas
followed us, leading four of my dogs. Having crossed a well wooded
strath, we reached a little crystal river, whose margin was trampled
down with the spoor of a great variety of heavy game, but especially of
buffalo and rhinoceros. We took up the spoor of a troop of buffaloes,
which we followed along a path made by the heavy beasts of the forest
through a neck in the hills; and emerging from the thicket, we beheld,
on the other side of a valley, which had opened upon us, a herd of about
ten huge bull buffaloes. These I attempted to stalk, but was defeated by
a large herd of zebras, which, getting our wind, charged past and
started the buffaloes. I ordered the Bechuanas to release the dogs; and
spurring Colesberg, which I rode for the first time since the affair
with the lioness, I gave chase. The buffaloes crossed the valley in
front of me, and made for a succession of dense thickets in the hills to
the northward. As they crossed the valley by riding hard I obtained a
broadside shot at the last bull, and fired both barrels into him. He,
however, continued his course, but I presently separated him, along with
two other bulls, from the troop. My rifle being a two-grooved, which is
hard to load, I was unable to do so on horseback, and followed with it
empty, in the hope of bringing them to bay. In passing through a grove
of thorny trees I lost sight of the wounded buffalo; he had turned short
and doubled back, a common practice with them when wounded. After
following the other two at a hard gallop for about two miles, I was
riding within five yards of their huge broad sterns. They exhaled a
strong bovine smell, which came hot in my face. I expected every minute
that they would come to bay, and give me time to load; but this they did
not seem disposed to do. At length, finding I had the speed of them, I
increased my pace; and going ahead, I placed myself right before the
finest bull, thus expecting to force him to stand at bay; upon which he
instantly charged me with a low roar, very similar to the voice of a
lion. Colesberg neatly avoided the charge, and the bull resumed his
northward course. We now entered on rocky ground, and the forest became
more dense as we proceeded. The buffaloes were evidently making for some
strong retreat. I, however, managed with much difficulty to hold them in
view, following as best I could through thorny thickets. Isaac rode
some hundred yards behind, and kept shouting to me to drop the pursuit,
or I should be killed. At last the buffaloes suddenly pulled up, and
stood at bay in a thicket, within twenty yards of me. Springing from my
horse, I hastily loaded my two-grooved rifle, which I had scarcely
completed when Isaac rode up and inquired what had become of the
buffaloes, little dreaming that they were standing within twenty yards
of him. I answered by pointing my rifle across his horse's nose, and
letting fly sharp right and left at the two buffaloes. A headlong
charge, accompanied by a muffled roar, was the result. In an instant I
was round a clump of tangled thorn-trees; but Isaac, by the violence of
his efforts to get his horse in motion, lost his balance, and at the
same instant, his girths giving way, himself, his saddle, and big Dutch
rifle, all came to the ground together, with a heavy crash right in the
path of the infuriated buffaloes. Two of the dogs, which had fortunately
that moment joined us, met them in their charge, and, by diverting their
attention, probably saved Isaac from instant destruction. The buffaloes
now took up another position in an adjoining thicket. They were both
badly wounded, blotches and pools of blood marking the ground where they
had stood. The dogs rendered me assistance by taking up their attention,
and in a few minutes these two noble bulls breathed their last beneath
the shade of a mimosa grove. Each of them in dying repeatedly uttered a
very striking, low, deep moan. This I subsequently ascertained the
buffalo invariably utters when in the act of expiring.

On going up to them I was astonished to behold their size and powerful
appearance. Their horns reminded me of the rugged trunk of an oak-tree.
Each horn was upward of a foot in breadth at the base, and together they
effectually protected the skull with a massive and impenetrable shield.
The horns, descending and spreading out horizontally, completely
over-shadowed the animal's eyes, imparting to him a look the most
ferocious and sinister that can be imagined. On my way to the wagons I
shot a stag sassayby, and while I was engaged in removing his head a
troop of about thirty doe pallahs cantered past me, followed by one
princely old buck. Snatching up my rifle, I made a fine shot, and rolled
him over in the grass.

Early in the afternoon I dispatched men with a pack-horse to bring the
finer of the two buffalo-heads. It was so ponderous that two powerful
men could with difficulty raise it from the ground. The Bechuanas who
had accompanied me, on hearing of my success, snatched up their shields
and assagais, and hastened to secure the flesh, nor did I see any more
of them, with the exception of the two Baquaines, who remained with me,
being engaged in a plot with my interpreter to prevent my penetrating to
Bamangwato. Isaac did not soon forget his adventure with the buffaloes;
and at night over the fire he informed my men that I was mad, and that
any man who followed me was going headlong to his own destruction. At an
early hour on the 5th, I continued my march through a glorious country
of hill and dale, throughout which water was abundant.




[From Household Words.]

EARTH'S HARVESTS.

    "Peace hath her victories, no less renowned than War."

                            MILTON'S _Sonnet to Cromwell._


    Two hundred years ago,[6] the moon
      Shone on a battle plain;
    Cold through that glowing night of June
      Lay steeds and riders slain;
    And daisies, bending 'neath strange dew,
      Wept in the silver light;
    The very turf a regal hue
      Assumed that fatal night.

    Time past--but long, to tell the tale,
      Some battle-ax or shield,
    Or cloven skull, or shattered mail,
      Were found upon the field;
    The grass grew thickest on the spot
      Where high were heaped the dead,
    And well it marked had men forgot,
      Where the great charge was made.

    To-day--the sun looks laughing down
      Upon the harvest plain,
    The little gleaners, rosy-brown,
      The merry reapers' train;
    The rich sheaves heaped together stand,
      And resting in their shade,
    A mother, working close at hand,
      Her sleeping babe hath laid.

    A battle-field it was, and is,
      For serried spears are there,
    And against mighty foes upreared--
      Gaunt hunger, pale despair.
    We'll thank God for the hearts of old,
      Their strife our freedom sealed;
    We'll praise Him for the sheaves of gold
      Now on the battle-field.


FOOTNOTES:

[6] Naseby, June 14, 1646.




[Illustration: Z. Taylor [From a Daguerreotype by BRADY.]]

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE LATE PRESIDENT.


Who has not heard of the opening words with which the court preacher
Massilon startled the titled throng who had gathered in Notre Dame to do
the last honors to that monarch whose reign was the longest and most
splendid in French annals, "_God only is great!_" How often does the
knell of vanished power repeat the lesson! How constantly does the
fleeting away of our own men of might teach us that

    The paths of glory lead but to the grave!

Death has again asserted his supremacy by striking down the most exalted
ruler of the land. The last sad cadence, dust to dust, his just been
faltered aver one who was our country's pride, and joy, and strength.
The love, the gratitude, and the veneration of a nation could not save
him. The crying need of an imperiled republic could not reprieve him.
His mortal strife over, his appointed task finished, he went down into
the cold embrace of the grave, and there, like a warrior taking his
rest, he lies and will lie forever. But he has left behind him what can
not die, the memory of noble aims and heroic deeds. The plain story of
his life is his best eulogy.

ZACHARY TAYLOR was born in Orange County Virginia, in November, 1784. He
was the second son of Col. Richard Taylor, whose ancestors emigrated
from England about two centuries ago, and settled in Eastern Virginia.
The father, distinguished alike for patriotism and valor, served as
colonel in the revolutionary war, and took part in many important
engagements. About 1790 he left his Virginian farm and emigrated with
his family to Kentucky. He settled in the "dark and bloody ground," and
for years encountered all the trials then incident to border life. The
earliest impressions of young Zachary were the sudden foray of the
savage foe, the piercing warwhoop, the answering cry of defiance, the
gleam of the tomahawk, the crack of the rifle, the homestead saved by
his father's daring, the neighboring cottage wrapped in flames, or its
hearth-stone red with blood. Such scenes bound his young nerves with
iron, and fired his fresh soul with martial ardor; working upon his
superior nature they made arms his delight, and heroism his destiny.
Zachary was placed in school at an early age, and his teacher, who now
resides in Preston, Connecticut, still loves to dwell on the
studiousness of his habits, the quickness of his apprehension, the
modesty of his demeanor, the firmness and decision of his character, and
a general thoughtfulness, sagacity, and stability, that made him a
leader to his mates and a pride to his master.

After leaving school, the military spirit of young Taylor was constantly
fanned by the popular excitement against the continual encroachments of
England; and soon after the murderous attack of the British ship Leopard
upon the Chesapeake, in 1808, he entered the army as first lieutenant in
the 7th regiment of infantry. He soon gained distinction in border
skirmishes with the Indians, and the declaration of war with England
found him promoted to the rank of captain. Within sixty days after the
commencement of hostilities in 1812, the imbecility of Hull lost to the
country its Michigan territory, and fearfully jeoparded the whole
northwestern region. It was of the utmost importance to intrust the few
and feeble forts of that great dominion to men of established valor and
discretion. Captain Taylor was at once invested with the command of FORT
HARRISON, situated on the Wabash, in the very heart of the Indian
country. The defenses of this post were in a miserable condition, and
its garrison consisted of only fifty men, of whom thirty were disabled
by sickness. With this little handful of soldiers, the young commander
immediately set about repairing the fortifications. He had hardly
completed his work, when, on the night of the 4th of September, an alarm
shot from one of his sentinels aroused him from a bed of fever, to meet
the attack of a large force of Miami Indians. Every man was at once
ordered to his post. A contiguous blockhouse was fired by the enemy, and
a thick discharge of bullets and arrows was opened upon the fort. The
darkness of the night, the howlings of the savages, the shrieks of the
women and children, the fast approaching flames, and the panic of the
debilitated soldiers, made up a scene of terror, but could not shake the
determination nor the judgment of the young chieftain. He inspired his
men with his own courage and energy. The flames were extinguished, the
consumed breast-works were renewed, and volley answered volley for six
long hours till day break enabled the Americans to aim with a deadly
precision that soon dispersed their foes. This gallant repulse, at odds
so unfavorable, prompted a report from Major General Hopkins to Governor
Shelby that "the firm and almost unparalleled defense of Fort Harrison
had raised for Captain Zachary Taylor a fabric of character not to be
affected by eulogy;" and forthwith procured from President Madison a
preferment to the rank of brevet major, the first brevet, it is said,
ever conferred in the American army.

Major Taylor continued actively engaged throughout the war; but, being
without a separate command, he had no opportunity to again signalize
himself by any remarkable achievement. After the treaty of peace, he
remained at the West, faithfully performing his duties at different
military posts, and preparing himself for any future call to more active
service. In 1832, he was promoted to the rank of colonel; and soon after
the opening of the Florida war, he was ordered to that territory. Here
he was in constant service, and distinguished himself for his discretion
and gallantry in circumstances of the most trying difficulty and peril.
His entire career won for him universal esteem and confidence.

The greatest achievement of Colonel Taylor in Florida was his victory of
OKEE-CHOBEE, which was gained on the 25th of December, 1837. The action
was very severe, and continued nearly four hours. The Indians, under the
command of Alligator and Sam Jones, numbered about 700 warriors, and
were posted in a dense hammock, with their front covered by a small
stream, almost impassable on account of quicksands, and with their
flanks secured by swamps that prevented all access. Colonel Taylor's
force amounted to about 500 men, a portion of whom were inexperienced
volunteers. By an extraordinary effort, the stream in front was crossed,
under a most galling fire of the enemy, by our soldiers, who sunk to the
middle in the mire. A close and desperate fight ensued, during which the
five companies of the sixth infantry, who bore the brunt of the fray,
lost every officer but one, and one of these companies saved only four
privates unharmed. The enemy's line was at last broken, and their right
flank turned. They were soon scattered in all directions, and were
pursued till near night. The American loss was 26 killed and 112
wounded; that of the Indians was very large, but never definitely
ascertained. Throughout the whole engagement, Colonel Taylor was passing
on his horse from point to point within the sweep of the Indian rifles,
emboldening and directing his men, without the least apparent regard for
his own personal safety. This victory had a decisive influence upon the
turn of the war; and the government immediately testified their sense of
its importance by conferring upon its gallant winner the rank of
brigadier-general by brevet.

In the following May, General Taylor succeeded General Jesup in the
command of the Florida army, and in this capacity, during two years, he
rendered vast services to the country by quelling the atrocities of
Indian warfare, and restoring peace and security to the southern
frontier. In 1840, at his own request, he was relieved by
Brigadier-general Armistead, and was ordered to the southwestern
department. Here he remained at various head-quarters until government
had occasion for his services in Texas.

The project for the annexation of Texas, which was first officially
broached in the last year of President Tyler's administration, acquired
more and more weight and influence, until finally, in March, 1845, an
act to that effect was passed by both Houses of Congress, and was soon
after ratified by the Texian government. Mexico, although the
independence of Texas had been long before _de facto_ secured, stoutly
protested against the annexation. The special American envoy sent to the
Mexican capital to attempt an adjustment of this and other difficulties,
was refused a hearing, and great preparations were carried on by the
Mexican government for another invasion of Texas. In June, General
Taylor received orders to advance with his troops over the Sabine, and
protect all of the territory east of the Rio Grande, over which Texas
exercised jurisdiction. He accordingly marched into Texas, and in August
concentrated his forces, amounting to about 3000 men, at Corpus Christi.
Receiving orders from Washington to proceed to the Rio Grande, the
general, with his little army, moved westward in March, 1846: and after
considerable suffering from the heal and the want of food and water,
reached the banks of the river opposite Matamoras on the 28th of the
month. Colonel Twiggs, with a detachment of dragoons, in the mean time
took possession of Point Isabel, situated on an arm of the Gulf, about
25 miles east. General Taylor took every means to assure the Mexicans
that his purpose was not war, nor violence in any shape, but solely the
occupation of the Texian territory to the Rio Grande, until the boundary
should be definitively settled by the two republics.

After encamping opposite Matamoras, the American general prepared with
great activity for Mexican aggression, by erecting fortifications, and
planting batteries. The Mexicans speedily evinced hostile intentions.
General Ampudia arrived at Matamoras with 1000 cavalry and 1500
infantry, and made overtures to our foreign soldiers to "separate from
the Yankee bandits, and array themselves under the tricolored flag!"
Such solicitations were of course spurned with contempt. The American
general was summoned to withdraw his forces at the penalty of being
treated as an enemy; he replied that, while avoiding all occasion for
hostilities, he should faithfully execute the will of his government.
General Arista soon arrived at Matamoras, and, superseding Ampudia,
issued a proclamation to the American soldiers, begging them not to be
the "blind instruments of unholy and mad ambition, and rush on to
certain death." He immediately threw a large body of troops over the
river, in order to cut off all communication between General Taylor and
his dépôt at Point Isabel. A detachment of 61 soldiers, under Captain
Thornton, was waylaid by a Mexican force of ten times their number, and
after a bloody conflict and the loss of many lives, was obliged to
surrender. With but eight days' rations, and the country to the east
fast filling up with the Mexican troops, the position of General Taylor
became very critical. He at once resolved, at every hazard, to procure
additional supplies; and, leaving the fort under the command of Major
Brown, he set out with a large portion of his army, on the 1st of May,
for Point Isabel. He reached that place the next day without
molestation. Soon after his departure, the Mexicans opened their
batteries upon Fort Brown. The fire was steadily returned with two long
eighteen and sixteen brass six pounders by the garrison, which numbered
about 900 men. The bombardment of the fort was kept up at intervals from
batteries in its rear, as well as from the town, for six days. The
Americans, though possessed of little ammunition, and having to mourn
the fall of their gallant commander, sustained the cannonade with
unyielding firmness until the afternoon of the 8th, when their hearts
were thrilled with exultation by the answering peals of General Taylor
at PALO ALTO.

On the evening of the 7th, the American general, with about 2000 men and
250 wagons left Point Isabel for the relief of Fort Brown, and after
advancing seven miles encamped. The next morning he resumed his march,
and at noon met 6000 Mexican troops under Arista, with 800 cavalry, and
seven field-pieces, in line of battle, on a plain flanked at both sides
by small pools, and partly covered in front by thickets of chaparral and
Palo Alto. General Taylor at once halted, refreshed his men, advanced to
within a quarter of a mile of the Mexican line, and gave battle. The
conflict first commenced between the artillery, and for two hours
Ringgold's, and Duncan's, and Churchill's batteries mowed down rank
after rank of the enemy. The infantry remained idle spectators until
General Torrejon, with a body of lancers, made a sally upon our train.
The advancing columns were received with a tremendous fire, and
faltered, broke, and fled. The battle now became general, and for a time
raged with terrific grandeur, amid a lurid cloud of smoke from the
artillery, and the burning grass of the prairie. It rested for an hour,
and then again moved on. The American batteries opened with more
tremendous effect than ever; yet the ranks of the enemy were broken only
to be refilled by fresh men courting destruction. Captain May charged
upon the left, but with too few men to be successful. The chivalrous
Ringgold fell. The cavalry of the enemy advanced upon our artillery of
the right to within close range, when a storm of cannister swept them
back like a tornado. Their infantry made a desperate onset upon our
infantry, but recoiled before their terrible reception. Again they
rallied, and again were they repulsed. Panic seized the baffled foe, and
soon squadron and column were in fall retreat. The conflict had lasted
five hours, with a loss to the Americans of 7 killed and 37 wounded, and
to the Mexicans of at least 250 killed and wounded.

In the evening, a council of war was held upon the propriety of
persisting to advance upon Fort Brown in spite of the vastly superior
force of the enemy. Of the thirteen officers present some were for
retreating to Point Isabel, others for intrenching upon the spot, and
only four for pushing ahead. The general, after hearing all opinions,
settled the question by the laconic declaration, "I will be at Fort
Brown before to-morrow night if I live." In the morning the army again
marched.

The enemy were again met most advantageously posted in the ravine of
RESACA DE LA PALMA within three miles of Fort Brown. About 4 P.M. the
battle commenced with great fury. The artillery on both sides did
terrible execution. By order of General Taylor, May, with his dragoons,
charged the enemy's batteries. The Mexicans reserved their fire until
the horses were near the cannons' mouth, and then poured out a broadside
which laid many a proud fellow low. Those of the dragoons not disabled
rushed on, overleaped the batteries, and seized the guns. The enemy
recoiled, again rallied, and with fixed bayonets returned to the onset.
Again they were repulsed. The "Tampico veterans" came to the rescue,
were met by the dragoons now reinforced with infantry, and all but
seventeen fell sword in hand after fighting with the most desperate
bravery. This decided the battle. The flanks of the enemy were turned,
and soon the rout became general. The Mexicans fled to the flat boats of
the river, and the shouts of the pursuers and the shrieks of the
drowning closed the scene. A great number of prisoners including 14
officers, eight-pieces of artillery, and a large quantity of camp
equipage fell into the hands of the victors. The American loss was 39
killed and 71 wounded; that of the enemy in the two actions was at least
1000 killed and wounded. Fort Brown was relieved, and the next day
Barita on the Mexican bank was taken by Colonel Wilson without
resistance.

The victories of the 8th and 9th filled our country with exultation.
Government acknowledged the distinguished services of General Taylor by
making him Major-general by brevet; Congress passed resolutions of high
approval; Louisiana presented him with a sword, and the press every
where teemed with his praise.

As soon as means could be procured, General Taylor crossed the Rio
Grande, took Matamoras without opposition, and made Colonel Twiggs its
governor. The army soon received large volunteer reinforcements, and on
the 5th of August the American general left Matamoras for Camargo, and
thence proceeded through Seralos to MONTEREY, where he arrived the 19th
of September. The Mexicans, under General Ampudia had placed this
strongly fortified town in a complete state of defense. Not only were
the walls and parapets lined with cannons, but the streets and houses
were barricaded and planted with artillery. The bishop's palace on a
hill at a short distance west of the city was converted into a perfect
fortress. The town was well supplied with ammunition, and manned with
7000 troops of the line, and from 2000 to 3000 irregulars. The attack
commenced on the 21st, and two important redoubts without the city, and
an important work within, were carried with a loss to the Americans in
killed and wounded of not less than 394. At three the next morning, a
considerable force under General Worth dragged their howitzers by main
strength up the hill, and assaulted the palace. The enemy made a
desperate sortie, but were driven back in confusion, and the
fortification was soon taken by the Americans with a loss of only 7
killed and 12 wounded. The next night, the Mexicans evacuated nearly all
their defenses in the lower part of the city. The Americans entered the
succeeding day, and by the severest fighting slowly worked their way
from street to street and square to square, until they reached the heart
of the town. General Ampudia saw that further resistance was useless,
and, on the morning of the 24th, proposed to evacuate the city on
condition that he might take with him the personel and materiel of his
army. This condition was refused by the American general. A personal
interview between the two commanders ensued, which resulted in a
capitulation of the city, allowing the Mexicans to retire with their
forces and a certain portion of their materiel beyond the line formed by
the pass of the Rinconada and San Fernando de Presas and engaging the
Americans not to pass beyond that line for eight weeks. Our entire loss
during the operations was 12 officers and 108 men killed, 31 officers
and 337 men wounded; that of the enemy is not known, but was much
larger. The terms accorded by the conqueror were liberal, and dictated
by a regard to the interests of peace; they crowned a gallant conquest
of arms with a more sublime victory of magnanimity.

General Taylor could not long remain inactive, and with a bold design to
seek out the enemy and fight him on his own ground, he marched as far as
Victoria. But by the transfer of the seat of the war to Vera Cruz, he
was deprived of the greater portion of his army, and was obliged to fall
back on Monterey. Here he remained until February, when, having received
large reinforcements of volunteers, he marched at the head of 4,500 men,
to meet Santa Anna; and on the 20th, took up a position at BUENA VISTA,
the great advantages of which had previously struck his notice. On the
22d, a Mexican army of 20,000 made its appearance, and Santa Anna
summoned the American commander to surrender. General Taylor, with
Spartan brevity, "declined acceding to the request." The next morning
the ten-hour's conflict began. We shall not attempt to rehearse the
history of that fearful battle: it is written forever on the memory of
the nation. The advance of the hostile host with muskets and swords, and
bayonets gleaming in the morning sun; the shouts of the marshaled
foemen; the opening roar of the artillery; the sheeted fire of the
musketry; the unchecked approach of the enemy; the outflanking by their
cavalry and its concentration in our rear; the immovable fortitude of
the Illinoians; the flight of the panic-stricken Indianians; the fall of
Lincoln; the wild shouts of Mexican triumph; the deadly and successful
charge upon the battery of O'Brien; the timely arrival of General Taylor
from Saltillo, and his composed survey, amid the iron hail, of the scene
of battle; the terrible onset of the Kentuckians and Illinoians; the
simultaneous opening of the batteries upon the Mexican masses in the
front and the rear; the impetuous but ill-fated charge of their cavalry
upon the rifles of Mississippi; the hemming-in of that cavalry, and the
errand of Lieutenant Crittenden to demand of Santa Anna its surrender;
the response of the confident chieftain by a similar demand; the
immortal rejoinder, "General Taylor never surrenders!" the escape of the
cavalry to a less exposed position; its baffled charge upon the Saltillo
train; its attack upon the hacienda, and its repulse by the horse of
Kentucky and Arkansas; the fall of Yell and Vaughan, the insolent
mission, under a white flag, to inquire what General Taylor was waiting
for; the curt reply "for General Santa Anna to surrender;" the junction,
by this ruse, of the Mexican cavalry in our rear with their main army;
the concentrated charge upon the American line; the overpowering of the
battery of O'Brien; the fearful crisis; the reinforcement of Captain
Bragg "by Major Bliss and I;" the "little more grape, Captain Bragg;"
the terrific carnage; the pause, the advance, the disorder, and the
retreat; the too eager pursuit of the Kentuckians and Illinoians down
the ravines; the sudden wheeling around of the retiring mass; the
desperate struggle, and the fall of Harden, McKee, and Clay; the
imminent destruction, and the rescuing artillery; the last breaking and
scattering of the Mexican squadrons and battalions; the joyous embrace
of Taylor and Wool; and Old Rough and Ready's "'Tis impossible to whip
us when we all pull together;" the arrival of cold nightfall; the
fireless, anxious, weary bivouac; the general's calm repose for another
day's work; the retreat of the enemy under the cover of darkness--are
not all these things familiar to every American schoolboy? The American
loss was 267 killed, 456 wounded, and 23 missing. The Mexicans left 500
dead on the field, and the whole number of their killed and wounded was
probably near 2000. History tells not of a battle more bravely contested
and more nobly won: and well did the greatest warrior of the age, in
learning it exclaim, "General Taylor's a general indeed!"

The victory of Buena Vista was the last and crowning achievement of
General Taylor's military life. His department in Mexico was entirely
reduced by it to subjection, and the subsequent operations of his army
were few and unimportant. At the close of the war he retired from
Mexico, carrying with him not only the adoration of his soldiers, but
even the respect and attachment of the very people he had vanquished.
Louisiana welcomed him with an ovation of the most fervent enthusiasm.
Thrilling eloquence from her most gifted sons, blessings, and smiles,
and wreaths from her fairest daughters, overwhelming huzzas from her
warm-hearted multitudes, triumphal arches, splendid processions, costly
banners, sumptuous festivals, and, in short, every mode of testifying
love and homage was employed; but modesty kept her wonted place in his
heart, and counsels of peace were, as ever, on his tongue. His prowess
in conflict was no more admirable than his self-forgetfulness in
triumph.

His last great deed had hardly ceased to echo over the land, before the
people began to mark him out for their highest gift. He coveted no such
distinction, and constantly expressed a wish that Henry Clay might be
the chosen one. But the popular purpose grew stronger and stronger; and
General Taylor was named for the Presidency by one of the great
political parties of the country. During the political contest he
remained steadfastly true to himself. He neither stooped nor swerved,
neither sought nor shunned. He was borne by a triumphant majority to the
Presidential chair, and in a way that has impelled the most majestic
intellect of the nation to declare, that "no case ever happened in the
very best days of the Roman Republic, where any man found himself
clothed with the highest authority of the State, under circumstances
more repelling all suspicion of personal application, all suspicion of
pursuing any crooked path in politics, or all suspicion of having been
actuated by sinister views and purposes."

The Inaugural Address of President Taylor was redolent with
old-fashioned patriotism, and breathed the very spirit of Washington.
And his subsequent administration, though beset by sectional strifes of
fearful violence, was conducted with wisdom, firmness, equanimity, and
moderation, on great national principles, and for great national ends.
Owing to his profound deference to the co-ordinate branches of
government, and his inability to either dictate or assume, his policy in
reference to some of the exciting questions of the day was not, during
the short period of his administration, fully proclaimed to Congress,
and pressed upon its adoption; but, though a southern man and a
slaveholder, he had deliberately and explicitly declared himself in
favor of the prompt and untrammeled admission of California into the
Union. He was taken away in the midst of the controversy, just as he was
about to submit his views upon the subject to the representatives of the
people. His last public appearance was in doing homage to Washington,
on the birthday of our liberties, and his last official act was adding a
new guaranty to the peace of the world, by signing the convention
recently concluded between our country and Great Britain respecting
Central America. Disease soon did its work. Confronting Death with the
fearless declaration, "I AM PREPARED--I HAVE ENDEAVORED TO DO MY DUTY,"
the old hero succumbed--his first and last surrender.

General Taylor married in early life a lady of Virginia, and was
connected either by affinity or blood with many of the most noted
families of the Old Dominion. His excellent consort, a son, and a
daughter, survive him. In person, General Taylor was about five feet
eight inches in height, and like most of our revolutionary generals, was
inclined to corpulency. His hair was gray, his brow ample, his eye
vivid, and his features plain, but full of firmness, intelligence, and
benevolence. His manners were easy and cordial, his dress, habits, and
tastes simple, and his style of living temperate in the extreme. His
speeches and his official papers, both military and civil, are alike
famed for their propriety of feeling and their chastity of diction. His
private life was unblemished, and the loveliness of his disposition made
him the idol of his own household and the favorite of all who knew him.
His martial courage was only equaled by his Spartan simplicity, his
unaffected modesty, his ever wakeful humanity, his inflexible integrity,
his uncompromising truthfulness, his lofty magnanimity, his unbounded
patriotism, and his unfaltering loyalty to duty. His mind was of an
original and solid cast, admirably balanced, and combining the
comprehensiveness of reason with the penetration of instinct. Its
controlling element was a strong, sterling sense, that of itself
rendered him a wise counselor and a safe leader. All of his personal
attributes and antecedents made him pre-eminently a man of the people,
and remarkably qualified him to be the stay and surety of his country in
this its day of danger.

    A braver soldier never wielded sword--
    A gentler heart did never sway in council.
    But he is dead--and millions weep his loss.




[From "Hunting Adventures in South Africa."]

ENCOUNTER WITH A LIONESS.


Suddenly I observed a number of vultures seated on the plain about a
quarter of a mile ahead of us, and close beside them stood a huge
lioness, consuming a blesblok which she had killed. She was assisted in
her repast by about a dozen jackals, which were feasting along with her
in the most friendly and confidential manner. Directing my followers'
attention to the spot, I remarked, "I see the lion;" to which they
replied, "Whar? whar? Yah! Almagtig! dat is he;" and instantly reining
in their steeds and wheeling about, they pressed their heels to their
horses' sides, and were preparing to betake themselves to flight. I
asked them what they were going to do. To which they answered, "We have
not yet placed caps on our rifles." This was true; but while this short
conversation was passing the lioness had observed us. Raising her full,
round face, she overhauled us for a few seconds, and then set off at a
smart canter toward a range of mountains some miles to the northward;
the whole troop of jackals also started off in another direction; there
was, therefore, no time to think of caps. The first move was to bring
her to bay, and not a second was to be lost. Spurring my good and lively
steed, and shouting to my men to follow, I flew across the plain, and,
being fortunately mounted on Colesberg, the flower of my stud, I gained
upon her at every stride. This was to me a joyful moment, and I at once
made up my mind that she or I must die.

The lioness having had a long start of me, we went over a considerable
extent of ground before I came up with her. She was a large, full-grown
beast, and the bare and level nature of the plain added to her imposing
appearance. Finding that I gained upon her, she reduced her pace from a
canter to a trot, carrying her tail stuck out behind her, and slewed a
little to one side. I shouted loudly to her to halt, as I wished to
speak with her, upon which she suddenly pulled up, and sat on her
haunches like a dog, with her back toward me, not even deigning to look
round. She then appeared to say to herself, "Does this fellow know who
he is after?" Having thus sat for half a minute, as if involved in
thought, she sprang to her feet, and, fating about, stood looking at me
for a few seconds, moving her tail slowly from side to side, showing her
teeth, and growling fiercely. She next made a short run forward, making
a loud, rumbling noise like thunder. This she did to intimidate me; but,
finding that I did not flinch an inch, nor seem to heed her hostile
demonstrations, she quietly stretched out her massive arms, and lay down
on the grass. My Hottentots now coming up, we all three dismounted, and,
drawing our rifles from their holsters, we looked to see if the powder
was up in the nipples, and put on our caps. While this was doing the
lioness sat up, and showed evident symptoms of uneasiness. She looked
first at us, and then behind her, as if to see if the coast were clear;
after which she made a short run toward us, uttering her deep-drawn
murderous growls. Having secured the three horses to one another by
their rheims, we led them on as if we intended to pass her, in the hope
of obtaining a broadside. But this she carefully avoided to expose,
presenting only her full front. I had given Stofulus my Moore rifle,
with orders to shoot her if she should spring upon me, but on no account
to fire before me. Kleinboy was to stand ready to hand me my Purdey
rifle, in case the two-grooved Dixon should not prove sufficient. My men
as yet had been steady, but they were in a precious stew, their faces
having assumed a ghastly paleness, and I had a painful feeling that I
could place no reliance on them.

Now, then, for it, neck or nothing! She is within sixty yards of us, and
she keeps advancing. We turned the horses' tails to her. I knelt on one
side, and, taking a steady aim at her breast, let fly. The ball cracked
loudly on her tawny hide, and crippled her in the shoulder, upon which
she charged with an appalling roar, and in the twinkling of an eye she
was in the midst of us. At this moment Stofolus's rifle exploded in his
hand, and Kleinboy, whom I had ordered to stand ready by me, danced
about like a duck in a gale of wind. The lioness sprang upon Colesberg,
and fearfully lacerated his ribs and haunches with her horrid teeth and
claws; the worst wound was on his haunch, which exhibited a sickening,
yawning gash, more than twelve inches long, almost laying bare the very
bone. I was very cool and steady, and did not feel in the least degree
nervous, having fortunately great confidence in my own shooting; but I
must confess, when the whole affair was over, I felt that it was a very
awful situation, and attended with extreme peril, as I had no friend
with me on whom I could rely.

When the lioness sprang on Colesberg, I stood out from the horses, ready
with my second barrel for the first chance she should give me of a clear
shot. This she quickly did; for, seemingly satisfied with the revenge
she had now taken, she quitted Colesberg, and, slewing her tail to one
side, trotted sulkily past within a few paces of me, taking one step to
the left. I pitched my rifle to my shoulder, and in another second the
lioness was stretched on the plain a lifeless corpse. In the struggles
of death she half turned on her back, and stretched her neck and fore
arms convulsively, when she fell back to her former position; her mighty
arms hung powerless by her side, her lower jaw fell, blood streamed from
her mouth, and she expired. At the moment I fired my second shot,
Stofolus, who hardly knew whether he was alive or dead, allowed the
three horses to escape. These galloped frantically across the plain, on
which he and Kleinboy instantly started after them, leaving me standing
alone and unarmed within a few paces of the lioness, which they, from
their anxiety to be out of the way, evidently considered quite capable
of doing further mischief.

Such is ever the case with these worthies, and with nearly all the
natives of South Africa. No reliance can be placed on them. They will to
a certainty forsake their master in the most dastardly manner in the
hour of peril, and leave him in the lurch. A stranger, however, hearing
these fellows recounting their own gallant adventures, when sitting in
the evening along with their comrades round a blazing fire, or under the
influence of their adored "Cape smoke" or native brandy, might fancy
them to be the bravest of the brave. Having skinned the lioness and cut
off her head, we placed her trophies upon Beauty and held for camp.
Before we had proceeded a hundred yards from the carcass, upward of
sixty vultures, whom the lioness had often fed were feasting on her
remains.




[From Dickens's "Household Words."]

THE YOUNG ADVOCATE.


Antoine de Chaulieu was the son of a poor gentleman of Normandy, with a
long genealogy, a short rent-roll, and a large family. Jacques Rollet
was the son of a brewer, who did not know who his grandfather was; but
he had a long purse and only two children. As these youths flourished in
the early days of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and were near
neighbors, they naturally hated each other. Their enmity commenced at
school, where the delicate and refined De Chaulieu being the only
gentilhomme among the scholars, was the favorite of the master (who was
a bit of an aristocrat in his heart) although he was about the worst
dressed boy in the establishment, and never had a son to spend; while
Jacques Rollet, sturdy and rough, with smart clothes and plenty of
money, got flogged six days in the week, ostensibly for being stupid and
not learning his lessons--which, indeed, he did not--but, in reality,
for constantly quarreling with and insulting De Chaulieu, who had not
strength to cope with him. When they left the academy, the feud
continued in all its vigor, and was fostered by a thousand little
circumstances arising out of the state of the times, till a separation
ensued in consequence of an aunt of Antoine de Chaulieu's undertaking
the expense of sending him to Paris to study the law, and of maintaining
him there during the necessary period.

With the progress of events came some degree of reaction in favor of
birth and nobility, and then Antoine, who had passed for the bar, began
to hold up his head and endeavored to push his fortunes; but fate seemed
against him. He felt certain that if he possessed any gift in the world
it was that of eloquence, but he could get no cause to plead; and his
aunt dying inopportunely, first his resources failed, and then his
health. He had no sooner returned to his home, than, to complicate his
difficulties completely, he fell in love with Mademoiselle Natalie de
Bellefonds, who had just returned from Paris, where she had been
completing her education. To expatiate on the perfections of
Mademoiselle Natalie, would be a waste of ink and paper; it is
sufficient to say that she really was a very charming girl, with a
fortune which, though not large, would have been a most desirable
acquisition to De Chaulieu, who had nothing. Neither was the fair
Natalie indisposed to listen to his addresses; but her father could not
be expected to countenance the suit of a gentleman, however well-born,
who had not a ten-sous piece in the world, and whose prospects were a
blank.

While the ambitions and love-sick young barrister was thus pining in
unwelcome obscurity, his old acquaintance; Jacques Rollet, had been
acquiring an undesirable notoriety. There was nothing really bad in
Jacques' disposition, but having been bred up a democrat, with a hatred
of the nobility, he could not easily accommodate his rough humor to
treat them with civility when it was no longer safe to insult them. The
liberties he allowed himself whenever circumstances brought him into
contact with the higher classes of society, had led him into many
scrapes, out of which his father's money had one way or another released
him; but that source of safety had now failed. Old Rollet having been
too busy with the affairs of the nation to attend to his business, had
died insolvent, leaving his son with nothing but his own wits to help
him out of future difficulties, and it was not long before their
exercise was called for. Claudine Rollet, his sister, who was a very
pretty girl, had attracted the attention of Mademoiselle de Bellefonds'
brother, Alphonso; and as he paid her more attention than from such a
quarter was agreeable to Jacques, the young men had had more than one
quarrel on the subject, on which occasions they had each,
characteristically, given vent to their enmity, the one in contemptuous
monosyllables, and the other in a volley of insulting words. But
Claudine had another lover more nearly of her own condition of life;
this was Claperon, the deputy governor of the Rouen jail, with whom she
had made acquaintance during one or two compulsory visits paid by her
brother to that functionary; but Claudine, who was a bit of a coquette,
though she did not altogether reject his suit, gave him little
encouragement, so that betwixt hopes, and fears, and doubts, and
jealousies, poor Claperon led a very uneasy kind of life.

Affairs had been for some time in this position, when, one fine morning,
Alphonse de Bellefonds was not to be found in his chamber when his
servant went to call him; neither had his bed been slept in. He had been
observed to go out rather late on the preceding evening, but whether or
not he had returned, nobody could tell. He had not appeared at supper,
but that was too ordinary an event to awaken suspicion; and little alarm
was excited till several hours had elapsed, when inquiries were
instituted and a search commenced, which terminated in the discovery of
his body, a good deal mangled, lying at the bottom of a pond which had
belonged to the old brewery. Before any investigations had been made,
every person had jumped to the conclusion that the young man had been
murdered, and that Jacques Rollet was the assassin. There was a strong
presumption in favor of that opinion, which further perquisitions tended
to confirm. Only the day before, Jacques had been heard to threaten
Mons. de Bellefonds with speedy vengeance. On the fatal evening,
Alphonse and Claudine had been seen together in the neighborhood of the
now dismantled brewery; and as Jacques, betwixt poverty and democracy,
was in bad odor with the prudent and respectable part of society, it was
not easy for him to bring witnesses to character, or prove an
unexceptionable alibi. As for the Bellefonds and De Chaulieus, and the
aristocracy in general, they entertained no doubt of his guilt, and,
finally, the magistrate; coming to the same opinion, Jacques Rollet was
committed for trial, and as a testimony of good will. Antoine de
Chaulieu was selected by the injured family to conduct the prosecution.

Here, at last, was the opportunity he had sighed for! So interesting a
case, too, furnishing such ample occasion for passion, pathos,
indignation! And how eminently fortunate that the speech which he set
himself with ardor to prepare, would be delivered in the presence of the
father and brother of his mistress, and, perhaps, of the lady herself!
The evidence against Jacques, it is true, was altogether presumptive;
there was no proof whatever that he had committed the crime; and for his
own part, he stoutly denied it. But Antoine de Chaulieu entertained no
doubt of his guilt, and his speech was certainly well calculated to
carry that conviction into the bosom of others. It was of the highest
importance to his own reputation that he should procure a verdict, and
he confidently assured the afflicted and enraged family of the victim
that their vengeance should be satisfied. Under these circumstances
could any thing be more unwelcome than a piece of intelligence that was
privately conveyed to him late on the evening before the trial was to
come on, which tended strongly to exculpate the prisoner, without
indicating any other person as the criminal. Here was an opportunity
lost. The first step of the ladder on which he was to rise to fame,
fortune, and a wife, was slipping from under his feet.

Of course, so interesting a trial was anticipated with great eagerness
by the public, and the court was crowded with all the beauty and fashion
of Rouen. Though Jacques Rollet persisted in asserting his innocence,
founding his defense chiefly on circumstances which were strongly
corroborated by the information that had reached De Chaulieu the
preceding evening--he was convicted.

In spite of the very strong doubts he privately entertained respecting
the justice of the verdict, even De Chaulieu himself, in the first flush
of success, amid a crowd of congratulating friends, and the approving
smiles of his mistress, felt gratified and happy: his speech had, for
the time being, not only convinced others, but himself; warmed with his
own eloquence, he believed what he said. But when the glow was over, and
he found himself alone, he did not feel so comfortable. A latent doubt
of Rollet's guilt now burst strongly on his mind, and he felt that the
blood of the innocent would be on his head. It is true there was yet
time to save the life of the prisoner, but to admit Jacques innocent,
was to take the glory out of his own speech, and turn the sting of his
argument against himself. Besides, if he produced the witness who had
secretly given him the information, he should be self-condemned, for he
could not conceal that he had been aware of the circumstance before the
trial.

Matters having gone so far, therefore, it was necessary that Jacques
Rollet should die; so the affair took its course; and early one morning
the guillotine was erected in the court-yard of the jail, three
criminals ascended the scaffold, and three heads fell into the basket,
which were presently afterward, with the trunks that had been attached
to them, buried in a corner of the cemetery.

Antoine de Chaulieu was now fairly started in his career, and his
success was as rapid as the first step toward it had been tardy. He took
a pretty apartment in the Hôtel Marboeuf, Rue Grange-Batelière, and in
a short time was looked upon as one of the most rising young advocates
in Paris. His success in one line brought him success in another; he was
soon a favorite in society, and an object of interest to speculating
mothers; but his affections still adhered to his old love Natalie de
Bellefonds, whose family now gave their assent to the match--at least,
prospectively--a circumstance which furnished such an additional
incentive to his exertions, that in about two years from the date of his
first brilliant speech, he was in a sufficiently flourishing condition
to offer the young lady a suitable home. In anticipation of the happy
event, he engaged and furnished a suite of apartments in the Rue du
Helder; and as it was necessary that the bride should come to Paris to
provide her trousseau, it was agreed that the wedding should take place
there, instead of at Bellefonds, as had been first projected; an
arrangement the more desirable, that a press of business rendered Mons.
de Chaulieu's absence from Paris inconvenient.

Brides and bridegrooms in France, except of the very high classes, are
not much in the habit of making those honeymoon excursions so universal
in this country. A day spent in visiting Versailles, or St. Cloud, or
even the public places of the city, is generally all that precedes the
settling down into the habits of daily life. In the present instance St.
Denis was selected, from the circumstance of Natalie's having a younger
sister at school there; and also because she had a particular desire to
see the Abbey.

The wedding was to take place on a Thursday; and on the Wednesday
evening, having spent some hours most agreeably with Natalie, Antoine de
Chaulieu returned to spend his last night in his bachelor apartments.
His wardrobe and other small possessions, had already been packed up and
sent to his future home; and there was nothing left in his room now, but
his new wedding suit, which he inspected with considerable satisfaction
before he undressed and lay down to sleep. Sleep, however, was somewhat
slow to visit him; and the clock had struck _one_, before he closed his
eyes. When he opened them again it was broad daylight; and his first
thought was, had he overslept himself? He sat up in bed to look at the
clock which was exactly opposite, and as he did so, in the large mirror
over the fire-place, he perceived a figure standing behind him. As the
dilated eyes met his own, he saw it was the face of Jacques Rollet.
Overcome with horror he sunk back on his pillow, and it was some
minutes before he ventured to look again in that direction; when he did
so, the figure had disappeared.

The sudden revulsion of feeling such a vision was calculated to occasion
in a man elate with joy, may be conceived! For some time after the death
of his former foe, he had been visited by not unfrequent twinges of
conscience; but of late, borne along by success, and the hurry of
Parisian life, these unpleasant remembrancers had grown rarer, till at
length they had faded away altogether. Nothing had been further from his
thoughts than Jacques Rollet, when he closed his eyes on the preceding
night, nor when he opened them to that sun which was to shine on what he
expected to be the happiest day of his life! Where were the high-strung
nerves now? The elastic frame? The bounding heart?

Heavily and slowly he arose from his bed, for it was time to do so; and
with a trembling hand and quivering knees, he went through the processes
of the toilet, gashing his cheek with the razor, and spilling the water
over his well-polished boots. When he was dressed, scarcely venturing to
cast a glance in the mirror as he passed it, he quitted the room and
descended the stairs, taking the key of the door with him for the
purpose of leaving it with the porter; the man, however, being absent,
he laid it on the table in his lodge, and with a relaxed and languid
step proceeded on his way to the church, where presently arrived the
fair Natalie and her friends. How difficult it was now to look happy,
with that pallid face and extinguished eye!

"How pale you are! Has any thing happened? You are surely ill?" were the
exclamations that met him on all sides. He tried to carry it off as well
as he could, but felt that the movements he would have wished to appear
alert, were only convulsive; and that the smiles with which he attempted
to relax his features, were but distorted grimaces. However, the church
was not the place for further inquiries; and while Natalie gently
pressed his hand in token of sympathy, they advanced to the altar, and
the ceremony was performed; after which they stepped into the carriage
waiting at the door, and drove to the apartments of Madme. de
Bellefonds, where an elegant _déjeuner_ was prepared.

"What ails you, my dear husband?" inquired Natalie, as soon as they were
alone.

"Nothing, love," he replied; "nothing, I assure you, but a restless
night and a little over-work, in order that I might have to-day free to
enjoy my happiness!"

"Are you quite Sure? Is there nothing else?"

"Nothing, indeed; and pray don't take notice of it, it only makes me
worse!"

Natalie was not deceived, but she saw that what he said was true; notice
made him worse; so she contented herself with observing him quietly, and
saying nothing; but as he _felt_ she was observing him, she might almost
better have spoken; words are often less embarrassing things than too
curious eyes.

When they reached Madame de Bellefonds' he had the same sort of
questioning and scrutiny to undergo, till he grew quite impatient under
it, and betrayed a degree of temper altogether unusual with him. Then
every body looked astonished; some whispered their remarks, and others
expressed them by their wondering eyes, till his brow knit, and his
pallid cheeks became flushed with anger. Neither could he divert
attention by eating; his parched mouth would not allow him to swallow
any thing but liquids, of which, however, he indulged in copious
libations; and it was an exceeding relief to him when the carriage,
which was to convey them to St. Denis, being announced, furnished an
excuse for hastily leaving the table. Looking at his watch, he declared
it was late; and Natalie, who saw how eager he was to be gone, threw her
shawl over her shoulders, and bidding her friends _good morning_, they
hurried away.

It was a fine sunny day in June; and as they drove along the crowded
boulevards, and through the Porte St. Denis, the young bride and
bridegroom, to avoid each other's eyes, affected to be gazing out of the
windows; but when they reached that part of the road where there was
nothing but trees on each side, they felt it necessary to draw in their
heads, and make an attempt at conversation. De Chaulieu put his arm
round his wife's waist, and tried to rouse himself from his depression;
but it had by this time so reacted upon her, that she could not respond
to his efforts, and thus the conversation languished, till both felt
glad when they reached their destination, which would at all events
furnish them something to talk about.

Having quitted the carriage, and ordered a dinner at the Hôtel de
l'Abbaye, the young couple proceeded to visit Mademoiselle Hortense de
Bellefonds, who was overjoyed to see her sister and new brother-in-law,
and doubly so when she found that they had obtained permission to take
her out to spend the afternoon with them. As there is little to be seen
at St. Denis but the Abbey, on quitting that part of it devoted to
education, they proceeded to visit the church, with its various objects
of interest; and as De Chaulieu's thoughts were now forced into another
direction, his cheerfulness began insensibly to return. Natalie looked
so beautiful, too, and the affection betwixt the two young sisters was
so pleasant to behold! And they spent a couple of hours wandering about
with Hortense, who was almost as well informed as the Suisse, till the
brazen doors were open which admitted them to the royal vault.
Satisfied, at length, with what they had seen, they began to think of
returning to the inn, the more especially as De Chaulieu, who had not
eaten a morsel of food since the previous evening, owned to being
hungry; so they directed their steps to the door, lingering here and
there as they went, to inspect a monument or a painting, when, happening
to turn his head aside to see if his wife, who had stopped to take a
last look at the tomb of King Dagobert, was following, he beheld with
horror the face of Jacques Rollett appearing from behind a column! At
the same instant, his wife joined him, and took his arm, inquiring if he
was not very much delighted with what he had seen He attempted to say
yes, but the word would not be forced out; and staggering out of the
door, he alleged that a sudden faintness had overcome him.

They conducted him to the Hôtel, but Natalie now became seriously
alarmed; and well she might. His complexion looked ghastly, his limbs
shook, and his features bore an expression of indiscribable horror and
anguish. What could be the meaning of so extraordinary a change in the
gay, witly, prosperous De Chaulieu, who, till that morning, seemed not
to have a care in the world? For, plead illness as he might, she felt
certain, from the expression of his features, that his sufferings were
not of the body but of the mind; and, unable to imagine any reason for
such extraordinary manifestations, of which she had never before seen a
symptom, but a sudden aversion to herself, and regret for the step he
had taken, her pride took the alarm, and, concealing the distress, she
really felt, she began to assume a haughty and reserved manner toward
him, which he naturally interpreted into an evidence of anger and
contempt. The dinner was placed upon the table, but De Chaulieu's
appetite, of which he had lately boasted, was quite gone, nor was his
wife better able to eat. The young sister alone did justice to the
repast; but although the bridegroom could not eat, he could swallow
Champagne in such copious draughts, that ere long the terror and remorse
that the apparition of Jacques Rollet had awakened in his breast were
drowned in intoxication. Amazed and indignant, poor Natalie sat silently
observing this elect of her heart, till overcome with disappointment and
grief, she quitted the room with her sister, and retired to another
apartment, where she gave free vent to her feelings in tears.

After passing a couple of hours in confidences and lamentations, they
recollected that the hours of liberty granted, as an especial favor, to
Mademoiselle Hortense, had expired: but ashamed to exhibit her husband
in his present condition to the eyes of strangers, Natalie prepared to
re-conduct her to the _Maison Royale_ herself. Looking into the
dining-room as they passed, they saw De Chaulieu lying on a sofa fast
asleep, in which state he continued when his wife returned. At length,
however, the driver of their carriage begged to know if Monsieur and
Madame were ready to return to Paris, and it became necessary to arouse
him. The transitory effects of the Champagne had now subsided; but when
De Chaulieu recollected what had happened, nothing could exceed his
shame and mortification. So engrossing indeed were these sensations that
they quite overpowered his previous ones, and, in his present vexation,
he, for the moment, forgot his fears. He knelt at his wife's feet,
begged her pardon a thousand times, swore that he adored her, and
declared that the illness and the effect of the wine had been purely the
consequences of fasting and over-work. It was not the easiest thing in
the world to reassure a woman whose pride, affection, and taste, had
been so severely wounded; but Natalie tried to believe, or to appear to
do so, and a sort of reconciliation ensued, not quite sincere on the
part of the wife, and very humbling on the part of the husband. Under
these circumstances it was impossible that he should recover his spirits
or facility of manner; his gayety was forced, his tenderness
constrained; his heart was heavy within him; and ever and anon the
source whence all this disappointment and woe had sprung would recur to
his perplexed and tortured mind.

Thus mutually pained and distrustful, they returned to Paris, which they
reached about nine o'clock. In spite of her depression, Natalie, who had
not seen her new apartments, felt some curiosity about them, while De
Chaulieu anticipated a triumph in exhibiting the elegant home he had
prepared for her. With some alacrity, therefore, they stepped out of the
carriage, the gates of the Hôtel were thrown open, the _concierge_ rang
the bell which announced to the servants that their master and mistress
had arrived, and while these domestics appeared above, holding lights
over the balusters, Natalie, followed by her husband, ascended the
stairs. But when they reached the landing-place of the first flight,
they saw the figure of a man standing in a corner as if to make way for
them; the flash from above fell upon his face, and again Antoine de
Chaulieu recognized the feature of Jacques Rollet!

From the circumstance of his wife's preceding him, the figure was not
observed by De Chaulieu till he was lifting his foot to place it on the
top stair: the sudden shock caused him to miss the step, and, without
uttering a sound, he fell back, and never stopped till he reached the
stones at the bottom. The screams of Natalie brought the concierge from
below and the maids from above, and an attempt was made to raise the
unfortunate man from the ground; but with cries of anguish he besought
them to desist.

"Let me," he said, "die here! What a fearful vengeance is thine! Oh,
Natalie, Natalie!" he exclaimed to his wife, who was kneeling beside
him, "to win fame, and fortune, and yourself, I committed a dreadful
crime! With lying words I argued away the life of a fellow-creature,
whom, while I uttered them, I half believed to be innocent; and now,
when I have attained all I desired, and reached the summit of my hopes,
the Almighty has sent him back upon the earth to blast me with the
sight. Three times this day--three times this day! Again! again!"--and,
as he spoke, his wild and dilated eyes fixed themselves on one of the
individuals that surrounded him.

"He is delirious," said they.

"No," said the stranger! "What he says is true enough--at least in
part;" and bending over the expiring man, he added, "May Heaven forgive
you, Antoine de Chaulieu! I was not executed; one who well knew my
innocence saved my life. I may name him, for he is beyond the reach of
the law now--it was Claperon, the jailor, who loved Claudine, and had
himself killed Alphonse de Bellefonds from jealousy. An unfortunate
wretch had been several years in the jail for a murder committed during
the frenzy of a fit of insanity. Long confinement had reduced him to
idiocy. To save my life Claperon substituted the senseless being for me,
on the scaffold, and he was executed in my stead. He has quitted the
country, and I have been a vagabond on the face of the earth ever since
that time. At length I obtained, through the assistance of my sister,
the situation of concierge in the Hôtel Marboeuf, in the Rue
Grange-Batelière. I entered on my new place yesterday evening, and was
desired to awaken the gentleman on the third floor at seven o'clock.
When I entered the room to do so, you were asleep, but before I had time
to speak you awoke, and I recognized your features in the glass. Knowing
that I could not vindicate my innocence if you chose to seize me, I
fled, and seeing an omnibus starting for St. Denis, I got on it with a
vague idea of getting on to Calais, and crossing the Channel to England.
But having only a franc or two in my pocket, or indeed in the world, I
did not know how to procure the means of going forward; and while I was
lounging about the place, forming first one plan and then another, I saw
you in the church, and concluding you were in pursuit of me, I thought
the best way of eluding your vigilance was to make my way back to Paris
as fast as I could; so I set off instantly, and walked all the way; but
having no money to pay my night's lodging, I came here to borrow a
couple of livres of my sister Claudine, who lives in the fifth story."

"Thank Heaven!" exclaimed the dying man; "that sin is off my soul!
Natalie, dear wife, farewell! Forgive! forgive all!"

These were the last words he uttered; the priest, who had been summoned
in haste, held up the cross before his failing sight; a few strong
convulsions shook the poor bruised and mangled frame; and then all was
still.

And thus ended the Young Advocate's Wedding Day.




[From the Dublin University Magazine.]

THE REVOLUTIONISM OF MIRABEAU.


The moral is evolved out of the physical, and the extraordinary in
animal structure has a kinship to the portentous in human action.

MIRABEAU, the infamous, born in an age, of a family, in a rank the most
vicious in the annals of vice, of parents whose depravity had
contaminated even their blood, was ushered with infinite difficulty into
the breathing scene he was so much to trouble, and offered, at the
outset of his disorderly career, misfortune and singularity in a
twisted fool, a tied tongue, and two molar teeth.

Maltreated by fortune, which, at the age of three, turned him by
disease into the ugliest of children--"a tiger marked by the
small-pox"--caressed and neglected by his dissolute mother, disowned and
persecuted as a spurious graft in his house and home by the celebrated
"Economist," his father--his very childhood presaged the disorders of
his youth and manhood; and his father, mysteriously reverting to early
crimes and calamities as the blight of his life, made it matter of
complaint that Honoré Gabriel, as a boy, had more cleverness "than all
the devils in h--l," and seemed destined from his childhood "to disturb
the monarchy, as a second Cardinal de Retz."

He was indeed _born_ a Revolutionist; and if he had not found the
elements of a _bouleversement_, was competent to have created them. But
just as nature gave the instinct, fortune supplied the breeding and the
occasion. The heir, pupil, find victim of a second family of Atreus and
Thyestes, the child was _trained_ into demoralization, vicissitude, and
daring. Believed himself to have been the favorite lover of the most
lovely of his sisters, he describes her as the "Atrocious
memoir-writer," a "Messalina, boasting of the purity of her morals, and
an absconding wife, bragging of her love for her husband." The Vicomte,
his brother, "would have been a _roué_ and a wit," he tells us, "in any
family but his own," and _was_, of a dissolute noblesse, its most
dissolute member. His mother, driven with contumely from her home and
the bosom of her family, under accusations the most revolting a wife may
hear from one who is her husband and a father, addressed the world in
public recriminations for her persecutor, not less disgusting or
condemnatory. The son himself, the most infamous man of his time,
completes the picture in the boast he made to the National Assembly,
that among the tragic woes of his family he had been the witness of
fifty-four lettres-de-cachet, seventeen of them on his own account!

As in Eastern climates the abundance of degenerate man will, at some
spot and moment, reach a point where it breeds the plague which
diminishes by depopulation the evil it can not remove by more merciful
agencies, so would it seem that in France the demoralization which
necessitated a revolution, concentrating itself in one family, produced
the man who was to begin the catastrophe.

At seventeen, leaving a military academy, he entered the army as a
sub-lieutenant, knowing, as he tells us, a little Latin, and no Greek,
but possessing, with very tolerable acquirements in the mathematics, a
fair share of the scattered erudition won by readings more desultory
than diligent.

Presented at court, admitted to the rare aristocratic privilege of
riding in the king's carriages at Versailles, laughed at as the Princess
Elizabeth's living specimen of inoculation, the incipient courtier and
embryo revolutionist was awakened from his delightful vision to find
himself suddenly transferred from his regal residence and gayeties, to
the sombre solitude of a country jail. He had been guilty of a
passionate attachment to a young lady of disproportionate expectations.

The young victim of parental wrong, thus severely taught that the
splendors of a court were but a veneer under which lay the terrible
springs of a wayward tyranny, killed time in brooding over the ideas and
studies which subsequently formed his "_Essai_" no less than his
character--"_sur le despotisme_." But before completing the work, the
father's monomania had been temporarily mitigated by the vengeance of a
year's imprisonment; and the son, instead of being sent to Surinam, the
Dutch Sierra Leone of that day, was graciously permitted, under the
_bourgeois_ name of "Buffiere," to enter as a gentleman volunteer the
French army that was about to crush the Corsicans in their noble
struggle against Genoese oppression.

In this liberticidal war, the liberty-loving Mirabeau performed his
first manly act, won his first public distinction, and initiated that
series of paradox, and moral revolutionism, that was hence to follow him
as lover, _litterateur_, and politician, to the grave. As his sword was
against Corsica and freedom, his pen was for them. He wrote over the
ruins of both a boyish philippic, admired by his victims, and burnt by
his father!

And while the brain that was to rule France as a tribune-king, was thus
evolving its idle progeny, the womb of a Corsican woman near him was
travailing with him who was to be Napoleon! At the instant France, by
the sword of her future liberator, was mowing down the new-born
liberties of Corsica--Corsica was breathing the breath of life into a
child, whose sword was to cleave down the fresh-won freedom of France!
As a Cæsar and a Marius sprung from the blood of the Gracchi, there
would have been no Corsican exterminator for France, had there been no
French exterminators for Corsica.[7] There are surely times when fate
plays with mortals, making of the murder of a generation or the
revolution of an empire a nursery game of coincidences!

Of the twenty years that followed, bringing Mirabeau to the footsteps of
the revolution, and within two years of his death, it was the odd fate
of this gay and gifted noble, guilty of no offense against the state,
nor in a legal sense against society, to pass more than the moiety of
his time in the sad rôle of a state prisoner; and the main incidents in
the unhappy sequence of wrong and suffering, the inevitable but
unrecognized logic of Providence, were briefly, and in succession, a
profitless marriage with the most distinguished heiress of his province,
carried off from twenty more eligible rivals by the superior strategy
of seduction and defamation, pecuniary extravagance, dissipation, debts,
sequestration of property, marital separation, successive imprisonments
by paternal intervention, deadly hate with the father, permanent
alienation from his adulterous wife and only child, licentious
connection with a friend's wife, with whom he abandoned his country,
exile in Switzerland, Holland, and England, successive litigations
self-conducted, a ministerial spyship in Prussia, and a career more or
less stormy, as a _litterateur_, in France.

Entombed in one of the horrid dungeons of Vincennes, solitary, hopeless,
almost without a sympathy, though in the very spring-tide of his rich
youth and activity, the angel of consolation, never far from us in our
darkest hour, came down, and in the genial guise of literature, visited
in his dungeon this man of infamies and suffering. It must, however, be
confessed against him that, maddened by the severity of a despotism
without appeal, in the wrong--and from that hand, too, whence he might
fairly have hoped a kinder gift, even the wholesomeness of books became
poisoned under his diseased digestion, and it became his wretched
pleasure through months to avenge himself on the virtue in whose injured
name he suffered, by licentious compilations, in which the man
degenerates into the satyr, and the distinctions of right and decency
are lost in the beastly excesses of a maniac imagination.

But so morbid a vice in a mind like his can be protected by no madness
of the passions or vindictiveness of misanthropy from the healing
influence of time; and if the leisure of his tedious incarcerations gave
us four or five books in the worst of services, they gave us also those
extensive studies of history and its philosophy to which we owe, among
much else that is great in literature or in event, the three works on
"Despotism," "State Prisons," and "Lettres-de-Cachet."

To our present purpose it would be of little use to indulge in any
lengthened analysis or literary estimate of these performances.
Gratifying his need of money, his love of fame, and, above all, a
vengeance warmly nursed, which even virtue can not censure, their
publication formed, probably, the happiest incidents of his life. The
first published in his twenty-fifth year, bears all the characteristics
of the young man of genius, roughened, no less than strengthened by the
asperities of the experience out of whose ireful plenitude he writes.
Rough and disorderly in arrangement, it is lofty, striking, eloquent in
style--cogent, daring, powerful in matter.

The last, the result of his long, final imprisonment, and published in
his thirty-first year, possesses similar attributes, aggrandized, or
improved. A great work, involving an inquiry into the first principles
of government, and, therefore, of infinite practical utility in the
career reserved for him, it wants too obviously the elevation of a
Montesquieu, the philosophy of a Bolingbroke, or the comprehensive
profundity of a Burke. It is a work of genius, but by a partisan, an
advocate, a man of powerful emotion and vivid conception, having a
strong will, a high purpose, and an enduring conviction. With a great,
sometimes an inapt parade of erudition, and an occasional loss of time
in inflated and declamatory commonplaces, there is yet, as a general
rule, work, rather than literature, in his sentences, and the just, the
practical, the statesman-like are the dominating qualities. We must not
look for the artist in Mirabeau as a writer: he is above that: nor,
whatever the range of thought we may justly concede him, may we,
therefore, expect the sublime; he is below that. With the eloquence of
an impassioned imagination, united to the unornamented vigor of a ready,
versatile, and comprehensive reason, he reminds one of some colossal
engine in forceful, though not always in graceful action.

In Holland, occupied in literature and the society of literary men, and
subsequently in England, in commerce with Franklin, Dr. Price, Samuel
Romilly, and Wilkes--among whom be it said, _en passant_, he acquired
the reputation of an habitual liar--a thousand circumstances must have
presented themselves, not more in his own studies than in the freedom,
seriousness, and activity he saw around him, to prepare and stimulate
his ambition for the lofty career of political action that awaited him
at home. In truth, if we may judge from the letters written during his
English residence, or the biographical fragments that occur in his other
correspondence, he seems, beyond his personal indigence, to have had no
other enduring interest but that of public affairs. His mind broods over
the tragic epochs of English history with a fascinating and curious
sympathy: there is an evident faith in a coming drama of popular action
for France, in which he is to play a leading part--a faith so early
ripened that, in 1782, meeting at Neufchatel certain State Deputies of
Geneva, he based on the inevitable meeting of the States General the
prediction, or rather the promise, that he would become a deputy, and in
that character restore their country to freedom.

Returning to Paris at a moment when the increasing and unmanageable
_deficit_ brought national bankruptcy and confusion to the very door of
the state, a course of angry and mercenary pamphleteering on Finance,
while connecting him with discontented men of wealth and influence,
willing, jointly with the police, to hire or use his ready pen, forced
on him education in another important, if unattractive, department of
the great question of the times.

His ministerial spyship in Prussia, which, subsequently divulged by his
own audacious publication of his secret correspondence, won from M. de
Montesquieu the remark, that "the infamy of the person might be
estimated by the infamy of the thing," was not without its compensations
in the political experience he extracted from it. It brought before him
the main interests of European diplomacy: won him access to the
principal intrigues and intriguers of a Court in transitionship, by the
death of Frederick, from eccentric greatness to orderly mediocrity;
habituated him to ministerial correspondence and reports, which, if
disgustingly mean, were, at all events, systematic and prescient, and
secured him--I could wish to say honestly--those historic and
statistical _data_ which, published in his elaborate work on the
Prussian monarchy, countenanced some serious claims to statesmanship.

Misfortune, passion, solitude, suffering, travel, extraordinary
adventures, extensive readings, varied studies, innumerable writings
thus admirably endowing his mind, so disposed, too, by nature, for the
daring and stormy struggles of the revolution, the only resource that
could surely be wanting to so enormous a compound of intellectual
strength, I mean the power of oratory, he was fated to acquire in his
lengthened trials for the recovery of his wife and legal rights.

Opposed by Alps of difficulties, the moral greater than the legal, for
the suits ploughed deeply into all the crimes or errors that had
dishonored his career, and would necessarily turn up masses of
documentary evidence, which on no less authority than that of his
father, must carry the tale of his infamy to every eye; yet his audacity
dared, as his genius surmounted, every disadvantage, and after fixing
the admiration of a province--to him a sufficient compensation--by the
ingenuity, the power, and the extraordinary resources of his eloquence
in a path so new to him, he succeeded in re-establishing his civil
rights, and but failed in the second, and, perhaps, less important suit,
by the accident of a technicality.

Passing by his double election as Deputy, at Aix and Marseilles, marked
by excitement, insurrection and all the stirring incidents that, in a
moment of great public agitation, might be expected to accompany the
_début_ of a daring and accomplished demagogue, we are now brought to
the greatest epoch of France, and, therefore, of Mirabeau--the meeting
of the States General; and the observation is naturally suggested that,
if this extraordinary succession of circumstances, marvelous as
_incidents_, but still more marvelous as _coincidents_, had not
specially moulded the man for his work, it might well be doubted that
the French revolution could have happened, or at all events, in such
gigantic proportions. Mirabeau's life was, as we have seen, a pupilage,
as it is now to become a mastership, in revolution. His Saturn of a
father had trained him, from his youth upward, into the executionership
of his order; and Heaven itself, as if seconding some such inscrutable
design, seems to have stooped to lead by the hand this servant of
Nemesis, through paths the most devious and unfrequented, but, of all
others, the most fitted to form and conduct him to the emergency.

A change, it is true of some kind in French Government, accompanied by
more or less confusion and bloodshed, had been long inevitable. Genius,
good sense, suffering, luxury, oppression, contumely, unprincipledness,
and folly, each boon of nature, each wrong of man, had concurred, after
more than a century of struggle, in necessitating a consummation.

In my opinion, the popular horrors that darkened the end of the
eighteenth century, though pointed in their way by the finger of
Mirabeau, legitimately trace their pedigree to the royal grandeurs that
closed the preceding one. The French Revolution was born of Louis the
Fourteenth. His policy--his achievements--his failures, and, still more,
his personal character and court deportment, killed monarchy in the
hearts of the French people. The prominent ruling characteristic of
himself and reign was an all-absorbing egotism. A maelstrom of
selfishness, and unconscious of any law of reciprocity to arise from his
relations to a common humanity, this chief and example of a numerous
aristocracy was the grand centre to which was to be directed every
affection and service, from which was to be circulated every volition
and ordinance. And need I say that no eminence of intellectual power--no
prudence of personal deportment--no brilliancy of external achievement,
can or ought to have any effect on spectators so keen-witted and
impressionable as the French, save to make additionally insupportable a
character which, even on the smallest scale, is, of all others, the most
odious and repulsive. The stern unity and perfection of order in which
he was enabled to present political power--that necessary evil of human
existence--but added intensity to the hate, as it added grandeur to the
idea of his despotism. In the eyes of his suffering subjects it brought
him face to face with the catastrophes no less than with the glories of
his reign, and without the merit of the avowal--_adsum qui feci!_ gave
him all its dread responsibilities. An old despot surviving his
greatness while retaining the stinging irony of its title--a saint amid
the standing reminiscences of his adulteries, expiating his pleasures by
annihilating those of others, and tormenting consciences to save his
own--his suffering and downcast people became at length disabused but
too utterly of the base apotheosis of his person and character, so long
maintained by him in the name of a false glory and debased religion.
They even publicly rejoiced at a death-bed made pitiable by the absence
of his mistress, confessor, and family; and meeting in mobs that,
encountering his corpse on its way through by-lanes to hugger-mugger
interment at St. Denis, they might tear it into shreds, gave early and
portentous evidence that the germ of an envenomed and bloody democracy
had been elicited in the very perfection of his stern and heartless
tyranny. The unblushing excesses of the Regent and of Louis the
Fifteenth, who gratuitously withdrew the last vail that concealed the
utter rottenness of all that claimed popular obedience, under the names
of religion, and authority, sufficed, though scarcely needed, to
_complete_ the discredit of the French monarchy; and, ascending his
throne, surrounded by a dissolute clergy, an overbearing aristocracy,
and a discontented and impoverished people, the robed Louis the
Sixteenth seemed but the calf of atonement of the Scriptures decked for
sacrifice, and doomed to expiate a century of court gayeties and crimes
in which he had had no part!

Mirabeau began the revolution with a thousand vague hopes and
expectations, and the conviction, communicated to his friend Mauvillon,
that "it was not given to human sagacity to devise where _all this_
would end." A living conflict of passions and principles, of low needs
and high ambitions, of lofty genius and infamous repute, a demagogue by
policy, an aristocrat by vanity, a constitutionalist by conviction, his
public conduct anxiously and perpetually brought in evidence one or
other of these conflicting agencies; but beyond the personal aim of
recovering his rank, and winning some sort of greatness at any price, he
was without one pervading or dominant public purpose, save that of
extinguishing the despotism that had injured him. Above all policies,
_abstractedly_ considered, this was the one dear to his heart. "I come
here to grant, not to ask pardon," was his reply, in a voice of angry
defiance, to some oratorical assurance that a life of usefulness might
secure the pardon of his earlier delinquencies. A horrid, but too
natural vindictiveness had interwoven the hate of arbitrary power into
every fibre of his brain. It was a passion or sentiment that he never
abandoned: it may be even doubted if he could have been purchased out of
it. Despite all the evils and mischances of life, there stood erect in
his soul this one small altar to virtue, or something that resembled it,
which he would have thrown down but under the direst necessity.

But of all the circumstances glanced at as furnishing the key to many of
the paradoxes of his public conduct, one of the most important, though
perhaps the least appreciated, is the dishonor of his repute. It is
difficult, with his present position in history, especially when taken
in relation to the now well-certified worthlessness of his
contemporaries, to realize to the imagination the full extent of his
infamy. "You dare," said his former friend Rulhiere, in a pamphlet that
had a wide circulation, "_You_ dare to speak of a country, Count
Mirabeau! If your brow were not trebly bronzed, how must you have
blushed at its very name! Have you one quality of father, friend,
brother, husband, or relative? An honorable vocation? Any one attribute
that constitutes the citizen? Not one! You are without a refuge, without
a relative. I seek your most ordinary domiciles, and I find them but in
the prison of Vincennes, the Chateau d'If, the fortress of Ioux, the
jail of Pontarlier!"[8]

Dumont, coming over to Paris, was so moved by the discredit attached,
in respectable circles, to his acquaintance, that he visited him with
repugnance and as a duty, but records the characteristic incident, that
on his first call he was so won by the magic of his host's conversation,
as to depart resolved on retaining, at all hazards, so agreeable a
friendship. The mention of his name, with the sight of his person, at
the opening of the States General, elicited groans and hisses on all
sides. The _Tiers-Etat_--whom he had honored by his aristocratic
adoption--were unanimous in refusing him a hearing the two or three
occasions on which he first sought to address them. The queen, whose
life, family, and regal heritage were at stake, received the assurance,
that such a person was willing to assist the views of the court, with
"the contempt due to vice;"[9] and "assassin!" "robber!" "slanderer!"
were the epithets almost daily applied to him in the senate of the
nation! Society, expiring under the weight of its own vices, saw in him
that well-defined excess that entitled it to the merits of purgation in
his extruism, of atonement in his martyrdom, and to place the hand of
menace and malediction on his head, as the scape-goat of its redemption!

Thus detested by all parties, his low character keeping him low,
Mirabeau, with all his marvelous power, found himself placed, by public
contempt, more even than by private need, at the mercy of circumstances.
Befoulment had so far eaten into his name, that, with occasionally the
best of desires, and always the greatest of energies, there stood a
blight over both. He felt that a moral leprosy incrusted him, which
repelled the good, and kept aloof the prudent. The contemned inferior,
in moral standing, of those that surrounded him, it was difficult to be
honest, and impossible to be independent. By a sort of law of nature,
too, his tarred repute attracted to it every floating feather of
suspicion, no less than of guilt, as to its natural seat; and thus it
happened that the lofty genius of Mirabeau, under the "grand hests" of a
hateful necessity, like the "too delicate spirit," Ariel, tasked to the
"strong biddings" of the "foul witch Sycorax," was condemned for a while
to pander rather than teach, to follow rather than lead, to please
rather than patronize, and to halloo others' opinions rather than
vindicate his own!

No man could appreciate the misfortune more fully or sensitively than
himself. Dumont tells us that, taught by events that a good character
would have placed France at his feet, "he would have passed seven times
through the fiery furnace to purify his name;" and that, "weeping and
sobbing, he was accustomed to exclaim, 'Cruelly do I expiate the errors
of my youth!'" And, indeed, the more sensible his heart, the more rich
and elevated his soul, the more must his torments have been bitter and
redoubled; for the very preciousness of the gifts of nature, the charms
of society, even the friendship of those that surrounded him, must have
turned but to the increase of his wretchedness!

It is easy to understand, then, that the tactics of Mirabeau, in the
first days of the revolution, were those of a man outside "a swelling
scene,"

    "A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
    And monarchs to behold,"

which he could only occupy by rudely breaking through a thousand
circumvallations of usage, propriety, and public opinion. As it was the
boast of Luther, that he, an obscure monk, stood alone for some time
against respectable Europe, so Mirabeau, on the eve of his public
greatness, was the most isolated politician of his age. "Mean men, in
their rising," says Lord Bacon, "most adhere; but great men, that have
strength in themselves, were better to maintain themselves indifferent
and neutral." Instinctively feeling that this was the policy of his
position, when repelled by both sides, he haughtily repelled them in
return, and the more he was despised the more inevitable did he make the
establishment of his importance. As, without a party, he became one
himself, so without a plan he took that of events, and without a policy
was content with that of display. In these early days, indeed, his whole
plan, system, and policy was to make his individualism tell, to
demonstrate, to all parties, what he was worth in journalism as a
writer, in the Assembly as an orator, in every thing as a statesman. As
he had nothing but himself, it became his business to make the most of
the commodity, which, so valueless in the beginning, ended in
outworthing all that was opposed to it.

But if this policy of display, no less than his education, sympathies,
and hates, bore him to the opposition, there were in his pecuniary
wants, and his ambitious dreams of a statesmanship, _à la Richelieu_,
circumstances that at times resistlessly brought him within the
influence of court power. Uncertain how far he could overpower the
disadvantages of his personal position, wounded that the movement party
were little inclined to value his co-operation, and still less to accept
his leadership, he early felt, or feigned alarm at the fermentation in
the public mind, and its possible evolution in great national
calamities; and before one act of legislation was accomplished, or he
had had a month's experience of the fanatical impracticability of one
side, I use his own words, and the intolerant spirit of resistance on
the other, he personally proposed to his enemy, Necker, and through him
to the queen, "the only _man_," he said, "connected with the court," to
concur, at the price of an embassadorship to Constantinople, in
supporting the court system of policy.

He appears to have fancied for some days that his proposals were
accepted; but before he could enter on any of the Eastern arrangements
his active mind had already suggested, he learned that the overture was
rejected "with a contempt which," as Madame Campan sagaciously admits,
"the court would doubtless have concealed, if they could have foreseen
the future." Contenting himself with the angry menace, "They shall soon
hear some of my news," within a month he became the author of successive
defeats, the most insulting a monarch could receive from his parliament,
and which were fated to exercise an active influence in the overturn of
that royalty he was afterward to defend.

The king, anxious to arrange the differences which kept the three orders
aloof from each other, and from legislation, had sent to the
_Tiers-Etat_ a message, wise in its suggestions, and conciliatory in its
tone. Under the eloquence of Mirabeau, the house passed to the order of
the day.

Irritated by insult, and complaining that the antagonism of the three
orders prevented any progress in the public business for which they were
convened, the king summoned a general meeting of all the deputies, and
after an address, in which he expressed his royal pleasure that the
three orders should form separate chambers, he commanded the assembly to
disperse, that they might meet under the ordinances his prerogative had
prescribed. The clergy, the nobles obey; the commons remain uncertain,
hesitating, and almost in consternation. The royal command is again
communicated to them, with the intimation, that having heard the king's
intentions they had now only to obey. The crisis of the royal
prerogative, obedience, hung but on the turn of a feather: the repulsed
Mirabeau arose, and turned it against the king. "We _have_," said he, in
a voice of thunder, "we _have_ heard the intentions _attributed_ to the
king; and you, sir, who have no place, nor voice, nor right of speech
here, are not competent to remind us of them. Go tell your master that
we are here by the will of the people, and that we are not to be
expelled but by the power of bayonets!"

Cheered and supported by the now reassured _Tiers-Etat_, he next, in
imitation of the English parliament, carried, that the persons of the
deputies were inviolate, that any one infringing that right should be
pursued as an enemy of the country, and that the payment of taxes, till
further legislation, should be obligatory only during the existence of
the legislative corps.

Added to the bold title of "National Assembly," newly adopted, these
votes were the assumption of a kingship by the _Tiers-Etat_; and as
public opinion enthusiastically backed the innovation, the divided peers
and ecclesiastics were compelled at length to join, and be submerged in
the mass of popular deputies.

A civil war could alone stand between royal power and its destruction.
For some weeks the court prepared for even such an eventuality.
"Ministers play high stakes," writes Mirabeau, on the 5th of July; "they
are compromising the king, for in menacing Paris and the Assembly they
are menacing France. All reaction is equal to action: the more the
pressure now, the more terrible do I foresee will be the reaction. Paris
will not suffer itself to be muzzled by a bevy of nobles thrown into
despair by their own stupidity; but they shall pay the penalty of the
attempt.... The storm must soon break out. It is arranged that I ask the
withdrawal of the troops; but be you ready (at Paris) to help the step!"

The demand was evaded by the king; the soldiery were largely increased
and concentrated; the arrests of the more revolutionary deputies,
including, of course, Mirabeau, were decided on; Necker was summarily
dismissed: but on the other side able and active emissaries roused Paris
by statements the most exciting, and taking all characters, with the
costumes of either sex, caressed, fêted, and partially won over the
soldiery, and before the court could take one step toward its purposes,
Paris was in full insurrection, the troops corrupted or overpowered, the
Bastile taken, and under the plea of anarchical excuse, the whole
_bourgeoisie_ of Paris placed in a few hours under arms as National
Guards.

The king, taught that it was not revolt but revolution, preferred, as
every body foresaw, submission to civil war, recalled Necker, and
visited triumphant Paris, at once the hostage and conquest of a popular
triumph.

Mirabeau, more or less connected with the Orleanists, had speculated
with them on the chances of confusion; for to him it was a small thing,
provided he had bread, that it was baked in an oven warmed with the
conflagration of an empire. Looking forward with complacency to every
contingency of revolutionary crises, assured that a common danger,
flinging aside, as unimportant, questions of personal character, would
make power the prey of genius and audacity, he was correspondingly
annoyed by a re-arrangement that promised for a time a well-grounded
tranquillity.

The destruction of the Bastile securing that of "The Syllas of thought,"
he now transformed into a full political newspaper, his weekly "Letter
to his Constituents," under which title he had evaded, from the first
assembly of the States-General, the censorship on the press. Aware, from
a knowledge of Wilkes and his history, of the power of journalism to a
politician, and above all, to a demagogue in a free country, he was, in
the full sense of the term, the first newspaper editor of France, and
owed to the vigorous use of this novel agency, not only useful additions
to his pecuniary resources, but a great portion of that popular idolatry
that followed him to the grave.

The court which, in calling together the States, had no higher aim than
to regenerate the finances of the country, and, as one step, to obtain
the help of the people in stripping a numerous aristocracy of their
baneful exemption from state-burdens, had already found out its own
share in the peril of the experiment, and now sought, by a close
alliance with the _noblesse_, to avert the ruin that too evidently
menaced both. But the torrent had but accumulated at each irresistible
concession, and every day's work added to the democratic elements of a
constitution that had already made royalty a cipher, and annihilated,
as political institutions, the church and aristocracy.

Of course new schemes of regal antagonism again raised their heads, and
again a popular manifestation, bringing Paris into the very boudoir of
the queen, at Versailles, demonstrated the impuissance of all that took
the name of French royalism. The October insurrection was fomented by
Mirabeau and his Orleanist friends, for the same purpose as that of
July, to secure personal safety, and obtain a new scene of action, by
terrifying the court into exile, or the acceptance of Orleans'
protection. Had the duke been raised to the "lieutenant-generalship of
the kingdom," Mirabeau counted on a premiership, in which he purposed to
become the Chatham or Pitt of France. Had Louis the Sixteenth fled the
kingdom after the example of the Comte D'Artois, he purposed to proclaim
a republic, and become its "first consul;" and should the doom be that
France should be divided by civil war, and cut up into its old kingdoms,
he speculated on a sovereignty in his ancestral country, Provence, which
had already greeted him with so encouraging an enthusiasm.

Strangeness of event! While the monarchy, so short-lived, still survived
the insatiate Mirabeau, two of the extraordinary contingencies he
speculated on have already happened, to the profit of other actors, and
the existing republic, in its mutinous armies, intolerant factions, and
insane dynasties, offers no very improbable portent that, even after
half a century of a centralized and well-fixed nationality, the old
repartition of kingdoms may again present itself!

The great consummation of the confusion, however, failed for the
overmuch of means. "A bottle of brandy was given," said the orator,
"instead of a glass!" and the mob's capricious _impromptu_ of carrying
the king back with them to Paris, still more than the cowardice of the
Duke of Orleans, defeated this deep-laid Machiavelian combination.

Whatever the character, however, of the people's success, it could not
but be an additional success for their leader. The revolution, of which
he stood recognized the unquestioned head, was now beyond all danger of
royal aggression, except by his own treacherous agency. In a campaign of
unimaginable brevity, he had not only vindicated the first place as an
orator in a senate now omnipotent, and become out of it the most potent
demagogue of his time, but as _un homme d'état_, surrounded by a
brilliant staff of the most active spirits and practical thinkers of the
day, Camille Desmoulins, Danton, Volney, Champfort, Lamourette, Cabanis,
Reybaz, Dumont, Duroverai, Claviere, Servan, De Caseaux, Panchaud,
Pellenc, Brissot, and others, was understood by every party to hold the
future destinies of France in his hand Emerging from two insurrections,
possessing, by his power, all their profits, and by his adroitness, none
of their responsibility, he found it now worth his while to break terms
with the Duke of Orleans, by a public expression of his contempt for
him as a scoundrel not worth the trouble that might be taken for him;
and excluded from the ministry, that lay open to him, by a self-denying
ordonnance of the Assembly, directly leveled at his pretensions, he
accepted a large subsidy from the king's brother--the Comte de
Provence--and formed with him, for the restoration or upholding a
monarchical authority, a mysterious and ineffective conspiracy, the
character and extent of which may be conjectured from its involving the
assassination of the Marquess de Lafayette.

The hate of Mirabeau for this worthy but feeble nobleman--his diligent
colleague in the struggle for liberty--was as intense as, at first
sight, it seems incredible. He was his Mordecai at the king's gate, for
whom he could neither sleep nor eat. Remembering that Mirabeau's passion
for complicated intrigue and daring adventure, even in politics, was
extravagant to disease, it seems possible that, as he advanced in his
rapid greatness, he secretly nursed projects or hopes as incompatible
with a constitutional monarchy, and an organized public force, in
respectable hands, as with the despotism with which he had originally
battled; and that, in his successive conspiracies, now with the
Republicans and Orleanists, now with the Count de Provence and the
queen, he had no fixed intention of ultimately benefiting those he
professed to serve, but proposed to use them as ladders to that exalted
position of a Sylla or a Cæsar, which, as Bonaparte subsequently proved,
was no more, perhaps, beyond his grasp than his ambition; influenced by
the insidious suggestions and doubts he carefully spread abroad, the
queen, as he saw with pleasure, looked on the new commander of the
National Guards as a "Grandison-Cromwell" (Mirabeau's damaging epithet),
whose concealed ambition aimed at the constableship of France, as a step
to that dread of French sovereigns, the "Mayorship of the Palace;" and
hence the court systematically declined the aids it might so often have
derived from the honesty, the popularity, and sometimes the good sense
of the American volunteer. At all events, we know that the assassination
of Lafayette--twice it seems plotted--would have left the National
Guards in the hands of some less popular and more pliant chief; and
that, when the general specifically accused his rival of the horrid
project, naming time, place, and means, he won no better defense than
the reply, "You were sure of it, and I am alive! How good of you! And
you aspire to play a leading part in a revolution!" The compact with the
Comte de Provence was of short duration: the queen began to distrust the
personal views of her brother-in-law, who threatened to become the Duke
D'Orleans of a philosophical party, and Mirabeau, to whom popularity was
the only capital, probably found that he could not afford the sacrifices
his employers demanded.

To preserve the _status quo_, and wait events, became now, for some
weeks or months, as much his policy as his accessibility to passion and
sudden influences would permit. He seemed to feel that he should give
time to the molten lava of his volcanic greatness to settle, harden, and
assume its individualism among things received. Holding aloof,
therefore, from indentification with either party--leaning now on one
side, now on the other; his speeches more with the movement, his policy
more with the court; forcing both parties into explanations, while
keeping himself, however, disengaged--he constituted himself their
arbitrator and moderator, overawing both extremes; and while maintaining
his pre-eminence of political influence, held himself ready to take
advantage, at the least cost of consistency, of any fundamental change
in the position of affairs.

In the month of May or June, however, a private interview with the
queen, in the Royal Garden of St. Cloud, followed by others, to the
renewed scandal of her fame, laid the foundation of a new compact with
the court, and a more decided policy. The chivalry of Mirabeau revived
under the enthusiasm won by "Earth's loveliest vision"--a queen in
distress and a suppliant--and he pledged himself, as the Hungarians to
her royal mother, to die in the service of saving her throne. But the
highest endeavors of Mirabeau have always at their base, like the
monuments of his country, the filthy and the repulsive; and the chivalry
of this new saviour of the monarchy received sustentation in a
bribe--higgled for through months--of twenty thousand pounds, and a
pension of more than that per annum.

About the end of the year, three or four months before his death, he
opened systematically his great campaign for what professedly was the
restoration of regal authority. He was to out-Herod in patriotism the
Herods of the Jacobin club: the court was to dare every thing short of
civil war--perhaps even that; and the existing confusion, whatever it
might be, was to be cured by another of greater extent, artificially
induced by the charlatanism of art political. His scheme, in some
points, it must be allowed, successfully imitated in our own days in
Prussia, was:

First--To reorganize the party of Order in the Assembly; and while, as
far as possible, winning for it the sympathy of the country, to excite,
by all available agencies, distrust and discontent with the opposing
majority.

Secondly--To inundate the provinces with publications against the
Assembly; and by commissioners, sent nominally for other purposes, to
obtain remonstrances from the departments against its further
continuance.

Thirdly--At a proper opportunity, to dissolve the Assembly, and order
fresh elections; at the same time canceling the constitution as illegal,
and granting another by royal charter, formed on a popular basis, and on
the written instructions which (on a system unknown to England) had
originally been drawn up for each deputy by his electors.

I shall not descend to discuss the oft-mooted point, how far the
wholesale venality that based the project is justified or palliated by
the object it is supposed to have had in view, because I know that with
Mirabeau money was not _a means_ to his defense of constitutional
monarchy, but his defense of constitutional monarchy a means to money.
If we except his relentless hate to French despotism in any hands not
his own, the principles, moral or political, of this leader of a nation
had no other tenure but the interest of his personal aggrandizement.

On another debate, whether with a longer life he could have carried his
counter-revolution to success, I will only remark, that, conceding that
in robust health he would have had it at heart as sincerely as in the
recorded hours of his sickness and despondency, it may be admitted, that
a struggle which, under every imprudence, seemed long to hang in doubt,
with the aid of his energetic and masterly polity might, perhaps, have
poised for royalty. But it is not to be concealed that the difficulty of
arresting and unmaking were even greater than those of creating and
consolidating the revolution. The king's aversion to decisive measures,
and well-known horror of civil war, made him the worst of colleagues for
the only policy his tool could wield with effect; and the great
demagogue himself, when obliged to discard the mask of democratic
hypocrisy that still partly hid the subtle and venal traitor of his
party, would have lost, like Strafford, many of the elements of his
potency; and despoiled, especially, of the miraculous resources of his
eloquence, must have contented himself with that lucid, common-sense,
consecutive daring, and power of strategic combination, which his new
friends were so ill-fitted to support.

Fortunately, perhaps, for his future fame, he died ere the structure his
arts had undermined tested his powers of reparation, and before that
wonderful magic of popularity which had so long survived, as it had,
indeed, so long anticipated, his deserts, had time to vanish under the
cock-crow of truth. His death was as well-timed as his political advent,
and has been praised by French wit as the best evidence of his tact; for
the expectations which the unparalleled rapidity, no less than the
innate marvelousness of his achievements had raised, no future activity
and fortune, scarcely those of a Napoleon, could have realized.

But if the retrospect of his career must convince us that one man in so
short a period never accomplished so much before, against such
disadvantages, so also must we admit that probably never before did any
one rest so wholly for his amazing achievements on the sole power of
intrinsic genius. It was intellect that did all with Mirabeau; and made
his head, according to his own boast, a power among European states. It
united almost every possible capacity and attainment. His rare and
penetrating powers of observation were sustained by the equal depth and
justness of his discrimination, and the rapidity and accuracy of his
judgment. Uniting, to his admirable natural capacity, an activity and
habitual power of application, more marvelous almost in their extent
than even in their rare combination, he possessed an understanding full,
beyond precedent, both of the recorded knowledge of books, and of that
priceless experience of men and things, without which all else is
naught; and as the complement of these amazing and unparalleled
advantages, he had the still rarer advantage of a felicity and power of
diction every way worthy of so incomparable a genius.

Looking with contempt at the stiff, ornamental, and childishly
antithetical style of his day and nation, he welded the flimsy elements
of the French language into instruments of strength akin to his own
conceptions, and wrought out of them a style for himself in which a
Demosthenic simplicity and severity of language is sustained by an
earnest and straightforward power which vivifies and amplifies all that
it touches. Startled by an innovation far beyond the conceptions of the
French academy, the writer was smiled at and neglected by the critics;
and it was not till they heard him launching from the tribune the
thunders of justice, disposing at pleasure of the inclinations of the
multitude, and subjugating even the captious by the imperious power of
his eloquence, that they began to discover that there was a "power of
life"[10] in his rude and singular language; that "things, commonplace,
in his hand became of electric power;"[11] and that, standing "like a
giant among pigmies,"[12] his style, albeit "savage,"[13] dominated the
assembly, stupefying, and thundering down all opposition.

It is the affliction of history, that, while raising her monuments to
gigantic genius, she is compelled so often to record an immorality of
parallel proportions. It is right that the infamy of Mirabeau should be
as eternal as his greatness. He was a man who, in his political, as in
his private life, had no sense of right for its own sake, and from whom
conscience never won a sacrifice. With great and glorious aims at times,
he never had a disinterested one. His ambition, vanity, or passions,
were his only standard of conduct--a standard, be it added, which,
despite the wonderful justness of his judgments, the depravity of a
sunken nature kept always below even his needs. Policy with him was
often but a campaign of vengeance or market of venality, and the
glorious exercises of literature but a relaxation of indecency or
business of wrong. In the study, in the tribune, or in the
council-chamber, glory was the only element that remained to
counterpoise, often with a feather's weight, the smallest influence of
gold or spleen; and in the most critical epoch of an empire, the poising
of his tremendous influence--the influence of so much earnestness and
magical power--was the accident of an accident. We admit for him, in
palliation, the demoralizing influence of terrific example, and of
maddening oppression; but where is the worth of a morality that, in a
man of heroic mould, will not stand assay? and what is virtue but a
name, if she may be betrayed whenever she demands an effort?

But however much a moral wreck was the heart of Mirabeau, nature, true
to the harmony, no less than the magnificence, of her great creations,
had essentially formed it of noble and gentle elements. Touched to the
core by the contaminating influence of "time and tide," its instincts
were yet to the kindly, the generous, and elevated; and those about him
who knew him best--attached to him more by his affections than his
glory--eagerly attested that in the bosom of this depraved citizen
resided most of the qualities which, under happier agencies, would have
made him a dutiful son, a devoted husband, an attached friend, and truly
noble character!

In fine, with an eye to see at a glance, a mind to devise, a tongue to
persuade, a hand to execute, this great man was circumspect in
recklessness, poised and vigorous in violence, cool and calculating to a
minutia in audacity and passion. As a friend, affectionate and
volatile--as an enemy, fierce and placable--as a politician, patriotic
and venal. Proud of his patricianship, whose _status_ and manners he has
lost, he is humble about a statesmanship that makes the first of his
glories. The best of writers, his works are written for him; the
greatest of orators, his speeches are made for him! Has he the most
unerring of judgments? He prefers another's! Is he a popular tribune? He
is also a royalist parasite! Is he earnest? He is then insincere! Does
he evidence great principles? He seeks bribes! Does he enforce
moderation? He awaits vengeance! Does he cause confusion? He is seeking
order! Would he save the nation? He is selling its liberties! Wonderful
man! great with enormous weaknesses, bad with many excellencies,
immortal by the expedients of an hour, his genius is a combination of
almost impossible perfections, as his political life the colossal result
of a thousand contradictions. United, they yield a deathless character,
whose Titanic proportions shall, age after age, be huger, as the mighty
shadows that cover it shall grow darker!

FOOTNOTES:

[7] It was this invasion that made Corsica a French island, and
consequently Napoleon Bonaparte a French citizen

[8] He had also been confined in two prisons, in the Ile de Rue, and the
Castle of Dijon.

[9] Madame Campan's Memoirs.

[10] Madame de Staël.

[11] Bertrand de Moleville.

[12] De Levis.

[13] De Ferrieres.




[From Hogg's Instructor.]

THE "COMMUNIST" SPARROW--AN ANECDOTE OF CUVIER.


We have been struck with the following anecdote of the great Cuvier,
which is recorded in the "Courrier de l'Europe" for February, 1850, and
trust the following translation will prove as interesting to our readers
as it has been to us. It forms an amusing chapter in natural history,
and forcibly illustrates that close observation which so frequently
characterizes eminent men.

Poverty in youth has a purifying tendency, like the "live coal" of old
which the angel passed over the lips of Isaiah. It inures the soul to
struggling, and the mind to persevering labor and self-confidence: it
keeps the imagination away from the temptations of luxury, and the still
more fatal one of idleness, that parent of vice. It, moreover, becomes
one of the most fruitful sources of happiness to the man whom God
permits to come out of the crowd and take his place at the head of
science and art. It is with ineffable delight that he looks behind, and
says, in thinking of his cold and comfortless garret, "I came out of
that place, single and unknown." George Cuvier, that pupil of poverty,
loved to relate one of his first observations of natural history, which
he had made while tutor to the children of Count d'Henry.

Cuvier and his scholars inhabited an old mansion in the county of Caux à
Fiquanville; the teacher's room overlooked the garden, and every
morning, at break of day, he opened the window to inhale the refreshing
air, before commencing his arduous duties to his indifferently trained
pupils. One morning he observed, not without pleasure, that two swallows
had begun to build their nest in the very corner of his little chamber
window. The birds labored with the ardor of two young lovers who are in
haste to start in housekeeping. The male bird brought the moistened clay
in his beak, which the female kneaded, and with the addition of some
chips of straw and hay, she built her little lodging with wonderful
skill. As soon as the outside was finished, the betrothed gathered
feathers, hair, and soft dry leaves for the inside, and then departed to
hide themselves in a neighboring wood, there to enjoy the sweets of
repose after their labor, and amid the thick foliage of the trees the
mysterious joys of the honeymoon. However that may be, they did not
think of returning to take possession of their nest till the end of
twelve or fifteen days.

Alas! changes had taken place during their absence. While the swallows
were laboring with such assiduity in building a house, Cuvier had
observed two sparrows, that perched at a short distance, watching the
industry of the two birds, not without interchanging between themselves
some cries that appeared to Cuvier rather ironical. When the swallows
departed for their country excursion, the sparrows took no pains to
conceal their odious schemes; they impudently took possession of the
nest, which was empty and without an owner to defend it, and established
themselves there as though they had been its veritable builders. Cuvier
observed that the cunning sparrows were never both out of the nest at
the same time. One of the usurpers always remained as sentinel, with his
head placed at the opening, which served for a door, and with his large
beak interdicted the entrance of any other bird, except his companion,
or rather, to call things by their right names, his brother robber. The
swallows returned in due time to their nest, the male full of joy, which
showed itself in the brightness of his eye, and in the nervous kind of
motion in his flight; the female rather languid, and heavy with the
approach of laying. You can imagine their surprise at finding the nest,
on which they had bestowed so much care, occupied. The male, moved with
indignation and anger, rushed upon the nest to chase away the usurpers,
but he found himself face to face with the formidable beak of the
sparrow who, at that moment, guarded the stolen property. What could the
slim beak of the swallow do against the redoubtable pincers of the
sparrow, armed with a double and sharpened point? Very soon, the poor
proprietor, dispossessed and beaten back, retreated with his head
covered with blood, and his neck nearly stripped of its feathers. He
returned with flashing eye, and trembling with rage, to the side of his
wife, with whom he appeared for some minutes to hold counsel, after
which they flew away into the air, and quickly disappeared. The female
sparrow came back soon after; the male recounted all that had
passed--the arrival, the attack, and flight of the swallows--not without
accompanying the recital with what seemed to Cuvier to be roars of
laughter. Be this as it may, the housekeeper did not rest satisfied with
making only a hullah-balloo, for the female went forth again, and
collected in haste a much larger quantity of provisions than usual. As
soon as she returned, after having completed the supplies for a siege,
two pointed beaks, instead of one, defended the entrance to the nest.
Cries, however, began to fill the air, and an assemblage of swallows
gathered together on a neighboring roof. Cuvier recognized distinctly
the dispossessed couple, who related to each newcomer the impudent
robbery of the sparrow. The male, with blood-stained head and bared
neck, distinguished himself by the earnestness of his protestations and
appeals of vengeance. In a little while two hundred swallows had arrived
at the scene of conflict. While the little army was forming and
deliberating, all at once a cry of distress came from an adjacent
window. A young swallow, doubtless inexperienced, instead of taking part
in the counsels of his brethren, was chasing some flies which were
buzzing about a bunch of neglected or castaway flowers before the
window. The pupils of Cuvier had stretched a net there to catch
sparrows; one of the claws of the swallow was caught by the perfidious
net. At the cry which this hair-brained swallow made, a score of his
brethren flew to the rescue: but all their efforts were in vain; the
desperate struggles which the prisoner made to free himself from the
fatal trap only drew the ends tighter, and confined his foot more
firmly. Suddenly a detachment took wing, and, retiring about a hundred
paces, returned rapidly, and, one by one, gave a peck at the snare,
which each time, owing to the determined manner of the attack, received
a sharp twitch. Not one of the swallows missed its aim, so that, after
half an hour of this persevering and ingenious labor, the chafed string
broke, and the captive; rescued from the snare, went joyously to mingle
with his companions. Throughout this scene, which took place twenty feet
from Cuvier, and at almost as many from the usurped nest, the observer
kept perfectly still, and the sparrows made not the slightest movement
with their two large beaks, which, formidable and threatening, kept its
narrow entrance. The council of swallows, while a certain number of them
were succoring their companion, had continued to deliberate gravely. As
soon as all were united, the liberated prisoner included, they took
flight, and Cuvier felt convinced they had given up the field, or rather
the nest, to the robbers, who had so fraudulently possessed themselves
of it. Judge of his surprise when, in the course of a few seconds, he
beheld a cloud of two or three hundred swallows arrive, with the
rapidity of thought throw themselves before the nest, discharge at it
some mud which they had brought in their bills, and retire to give place
to another battalion, which repeated the same manoeuvre. They fired at
two or three inches from the nest, thus preventing the sparrows from
giving them any blows with their beaks. Besides, the mud, shot with such
perfidious precision, had so blinded the sparrows, after the first
discharge, that they very soon knew not in what manner to defend
themselves. Still the mud continued to thicken more and more on the
nest, whose original shape was soon obliterated: the opening would have
almost entirely disappeared, had not the sparrows, by their desperate
efforts at defense, broken away some portions of it. But the implacable
swallows, by a strategic movement, as rapidly as it was cleverly
executed, rushed upon the nest, beat down with their beaks and claws the
clay over the opening already half stopped up, and finished the attack
by hermetically closing it. Then there arose a thousand cries of
vengeance and victory. Nevertheless, the swallows ceased not the work of
destruction. They continued to carry up moistened clay till they had
built a second nest over the very opening of the besieged one. It was
raised by a hundred beaks at once, and, an hour after the execution of
the sparrows, the nest was occupied by the dispossessed swallows. The
drama was complete and terrible; the vengeance inexorable and fatal. The
unfortunate sparrows not only expiated their theft in the nest they had
taken possession of, whence they could not escape, and where suffocation
and hunger were gradually killing them, but they heard the songs of love
from the two swallows, who thus so cruelly made them wipe out the crime
of their theft. During the fight the female remained alone, languishing
and motionless, on an angle of the roof. It was with difficulty, and
with a heavy flight, that she left this spot to take up her abode in her
new house; and, doubtless, while the agony of the sparrows was being
filled up, she laid her eggs, for she did not stir out for two days; the
male, during that time, taking upon himself to search for insects and
hunt for flies. He brought them alive in his beak, and gave them to his
companion. Entirely devoted to the duties of incubation and maternity,
she was only seen now and then to put out her head to breathe the pure
air. Fifteen days after, the male flew away at day-break. He appeared
more gay and joyful than usual; during the whole day he ceased not to
bring to the nest a countless number of insects, and Cuvier, by standing
on tiptoe at his window, could distinctly see six little yellow and
hungry beaks, crying out, and swallowing with avidity all the food
brought by their father. The female did not leave her family till the
morrow; confinement and fatigue had made her very thin. Her plumage had
lost its lustre; but in seeing her contemplate her little ones, you
might conceive the maternal joy which filled her, and by what ineffable
compensations she felt herself indemnified for all her privations and
sufferings. After a short time the little creatures had advanced in
figure; their large yellow bills were transformed into little black and
charming ones; their naked bodies, covered here and there with ugly
tufts, were now clothed with elegant feathers, on which the light played
in brilliant flashes. They began to fly about the nest, and even to
accompany their mother when she hunted for flies in the neighborhood.

Cuvier could not refrain from feelings of admiration, and was somewhat
affected when he saw the mother, with indefatigable patience and grace,
show her children how they should set about catching flies, which darted
about in the air--to suck in an incautious one, or carry away a spider
which had imprudently made his net between the branches of two trees.
Often she would hold out to them at a distance in her beak a booty which
excited their appetite; then she would go away by degrees, and gradually
draw them unconsciously off to a shorter or a longer distance from the
nest. The swallow taught her children to fly high when the air was calm,
for then the insects kept in a more elevated part of the air; or to skim
along the ground at the approach of a storm, as then the same insects
would direct their course toward the earth, where they might find
shelter under the stones at the fall of the first drop of rain. Then the
little ones, more experienced, began, under the guidance of their
father, to undertake longer flights. The mother, standing at the
entrance of the nest, seemed to give her instructions before they
departed: she awaited their return with anxiety, and when that was
delayed, took a flight high, very high in the air, and there flew to and
fro till she saw them. Then, full of a mother's joy, she would utter
cries of emotion, scud before them, bring them back to the nest, happy
and palpitating, and seemed to demand an account of the causes of their
delay.

The autumn arrived. Some groups of swallows collected together on the
very roof of the mansion of Fiquanville. After grave deliberation, and a
vote being taken (whether by ballot or otherwise, Cuvier does not
mention), the young ones of the nest, along with the other young
swallows of the same age, were all placed in the middle of the troop;
and one morning a living cloud rose above the chateau, and flew away
swiftly due east.

The following spring two swallows, worn down by fatigue, came to take
possession of the nest. Cuvier recognized them immediately; they were
the very same--those whose manners and habits he had studied the
preceding year. They proceeded to restore the nest, cracked and injured
in some places by the frost: they garnished anew the inside with fresh
feathers and choice moss, then, as last year, made an excursion of some
days. On the very morrow after their return, while they were darting to
and fro close to Cuvier's window, to whose presence they had become
accustomed, and which did not in the least incommode them, a
screech-owl, that seemed to fall from above, pounced upon the male,
seized him in his talons, and was already bearing him away, when Cuvier
took down his gun, which was within reach, primed and cocked it, and
fired at the owl; the fellow, mortally wounded, fell head over heels
into the garden, and Cuvier hastened to deliver the swallow from the
claws of the dead owl, who still held him with his formidable nails. The
poor swallow had received some deep wounds; the nails of the owl had
penetrated deeply into his side, and one of the drops of shot had broken
his leg. Cuvier dressed the wounds as well as he could, and, by the aid
of a ladder, replaced the invalid in his nest, while the female flew
sadly around it, uttering cries of despair. For three or four days she
never left the nest but to go in search of food, which she offered the
male. Cuvier saw his sickly head come out with difficulty, and try in
vain to take the food offered by his companion; every day he appeared to
get weaker. At length, one morning, Cuvier was awakened by the cries of
the female, who with her wings beat against the panes of his window. He
ran to the nest--alas! it contained only a dead body. From that fatal
moment the female never left her nest. Overwhelmed with grief, she, five
days after, died of despair, on the dead body of her companion.

Some months after this, the Abbé Tessier, whom the revolutionary
persecution had compelled to flee to Normandy, where he disguised
himself under the dress of a military physician of the hospital of
Fécamp, fell in with the obscure tutor, who recounted to him the history
of the swallows. The abbé engaged him to deliver a course of lectures on
natural history to the pupils of that hospital, of which he was the
head, and wrote to Jussieu and Geoffrey Saint Hilaire, to inform them of
the individual he had become acquainted with. Cuvier entered into a
correspondence with these two learned men, and a short time after he was
elected to the chair of comparative anatomy at Paris His subsequent
career is well known.




[From Hunting Adventures in South Africa.]

A GIRAFFE CHASE.


This day was to me rather a memorable one, as the first on which I saw
and slew the lofty, graceful-looking giraffe or camelopard, with which,
during many years of my life, I had longed to form an acquaintance.
These gigantic and exquisitely beautiful animals, which are admirably
formed by nature to adorn the fair forests that clothe the boundless
plains of the interior, are widely distributed throughout the interior
of Southern Africa, but are nowhere to be met with in great numbers. In
countries unmolested by the intrusive foot of man, the giraffe is found
generally in herds varying from twelve to sixteen; but I have not
unfrequently met with herds containing thirty individuals, and on one
occasion I counted forty together; this, however, was owing to chance,
and about sixteen maybe reckoned as the average number of a herd. These
herds are composed of giraffes of various sizes, from the young giraffe
of nine or ten feet in height, to the dark, chestnut-colored old bull of
the herd, whose exalted head towers above his companions, generally
attaining to a height of upward of eighteen feet. The females are of
lower stature and more delicately formed than the males, their height
averaging from sixteen to seventeen feet. Some writers have discovered
ugliness and a want of grace in the giraffe, but I consider that he is
one of the most strikingly beautiful animals in the creation; and when a
herd of them is seen scattered through a grove of the picturesque
parasol-topped acacias which adorn their native plains, and on whose
uppermost shoots they are enabled to browse by the colossal height with
which nature has so admirably endowed them, he must, indeed, be slow of
conception who fails to discover both grace and dignity in all their
movements. There can be no doubt, that every animal is seen to the
greatest advantage in the haunts which nature destined him to adorn; and
among the various living creatures which beautify this fair creation I
have often traced a remarkable resemblance between the animal and the
general appearance of the locality in which it is found. This I first
remarked at an early period of my life, when entomology occupied a part
of my attention No person following this interesting pursuit can fail to
observe the extraordinary likeness which insects bear to the various
abodes in which they are met with. Thus, among the long green grass we
find a variety of long green insects, whose legs and antennæ so resemble
the shoots emanating from the stalks of the grass that it requires a
practiced eye to distinguish them. Throughout sandy districts varieties
of insects are met with of a color similar to the sand which they
inhabit. Among the green leaves of the various trees of the forest
innumerable leaf-colored insects are to be found; while, closely
adhering to the rough gray bark of these forest-trees, we observe
beautifully-colored, gray-looking; moths of various patterns, yet
altogether so resembling the bark as to be invisible to the passing
observer. In like manner among quadrupeds I have traced a corresponding
analogy, for, even in the case of the stupendous elephant, the ashy
color of his hide so corresponds with the general appearance of the gray
thorny jungles which he frequents throughout the day, that a person
unaccustomed to hunting elephants, standing on a commanding situation,
might look down upon a herd and fail to detect their presence. And
further, in the case of the giraffe, which is invariably met with among
venerable forests, where innumerable blasted and weather-beaten trunks
and stems occur, I have repeatedly been in doubt as to the presence of a
troop of them until I had recourse to my spy-glass; and on referring the
case to my savage attendants, I have known even their optics to fail, at
one time mistaking these dilapidated trunks for camelopards, and again
confounding real camelopards with these aged veterans of the forest.

Although we had now been traveling many days through the country of the
giraffe, and had marched through forests in which their spoor was
abundant, our eyes had not yet been gifted with a sight of "Tootla"
himself; it was therefore with indescribable pleasure that, on the
evening of the 11th, I beheld a troop of these interesting animals.

Our breakfast being finished, I resumed my journey through an endless
gray forest of cameel-dorn and other trees, the country slightly
undulating and grass abundant. A little before the sun went down my
driver remarked to me, "I was just going to say, sir, that that old tree
was a camelopard." On looking where he pointed, I saw that the old tree
was indeed a camelopard, and, on casting my eyes a little to the right,
I beheld a troop of them standing looking at us, their heads actually
towering above the trees of the forest. It was imprudent to commence a
chase at such a late hour, especially in a country of so level a
character, where the chances were against my being able to regain my
wagons that night. I, however, resolved to chance every thing; and
directing my men to catch and saddle Colesberg, I proceeded in haste to
buckle on my shooting-belt and spurs, and in two minutes I was in the
saddle. The giraffes stood looking at the wagons until I was within
sixty yards of them, when, galloping round a thick bushy tree, under
cover of which I had ridden, I suddenly beheld a sight the most
astounding that a sportsman's eye can encounter. Before me stood a troop
of ten colossal giraffes, the majority of which were from seventeen to
eighteen feet high. On beholding me they at at once made off, twisting
their long tails over their backs, making a loud switching noise with
them, and cantered along at an easy pace, which, however, obliged
Colesberg to put his best foot foremost to keep up with them.

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




[From Picturesque Sketches of Greece and Turkey.]

ADVENTURE IN A TURKISH HAREM.

BY AUBREY DE VERE.


A short time before leaving Constantinople I enjoyed a piece of good
fortune which I believe has fallen to the lot of few men. Often as I
passed by the garden walls of some rich Pacha, I felt, as every one who
visits Constantinople feels, no small desire to penetrate, into that
mysterious region--his harem--and see something more than the mere
exterior of Turkish life. "The traveler landing at Stamboul complains,"
I used to say to myself, "of the contrast between its external aspect
and the interior of the city; but the real interior, that is the inside
of the houses, the guarded retreats of those vailed forms which one
passes in gilded caiques--of these he sees nothing." Fortune favored my
aspirations. I happened to make acquaintance with a young Frenchman,
lively, spirited, and confident, who had sojourned at Constantinople for
a considerable time, and who bore there the character of prophet,
magician, and I know not what beside. The fact is, that he was a very
clever fellow, living on his wits, ever ready to turn his hand to any
thing, and numbering among his other accomplishments, a skill in
conjuring feats extraordinary even in the East. He used to exhibit
frequently before the Sultan, who always sent him away laden with
presents, and who would, probably, had he professed the Mohammedan
Faith, have made him his Prime Minister or his Lord High Admiral.

There was nothing which this conjuror could not do. He told me that on
one occasion, dining in a numerous company, he had contrived to pick the
pocket of every one present, depriving one of his watch, another of his
purse, and a third of his pocket-handkerchief. As soon as the guests
discovered their losses, to which he managed to direct their attention,
a scene of violent excitement ensued, every one accusing his neighbor of
theft; and at last it was agreed that the police should be sent, for to
search the pockets of all present. The police arrived, and the search
was duly made, but without any effect. "I think," said the young
magician, "it would be but fair that the police should themselves
undergo the same scrutiny to which we have all submitted." The
suggestion was immediately acted on; and to the amazement of all
present, and especially of the supposed culprits, in the pockets of the
police all the missing articles were found.

The life of this man had been strange and eventful. Having quarreled
with his family in early youth he had assumed an incognito, and enlisted
as a private soldier, I forget in what service. On one occasion, in his
first campaign, he was left for dead on the field of battle. In the
evening some peasants visited the field for the sake of plunder. He was
badly wounded, but had his wits sufficiently about him to know that, if
he wished not to have his throat cut, he had better lie still and feign
to be dead. In his turn he was visited by the marauders; but, as fame
goes, it turned out that while they were hunting after the few pence he
possessed, he contrived to lighten their pockets of their accumulated
spoil. He had grown tired of war, however, and had settled in
Constantinople, where he embarked in all manner of speculations, being
bent, among other things, upon establishing a theatre at Pera. In all
reverses he came down, like a cat, on his feet: he was sanguine and
good-humored, always disposed to shuffle the cards till the right one
came up; and, trusting a good deal to Fortune, while he improved what
she gave, he was of course rich in her good graces.

One day this youth called on me, and mentioned that a chance had
befallen him which he should be glad to turn to account--particularly
if sure of not making too intimate an acquaintance with the Bosphorus in
the attempt. A certain wealthy Turk had applied to him for assistance
under very trying domestic circumstances. His favorite wife had lost a
precious ring, which had doubtless been stolen either by one of his
other wives, under the influence of jealousy, or by a female slave.
Would the magician pay a visit to his house, recover the ring, and
expose the delinquent? "Now," said he, "if I once get within the walls,
I shall be sure to force my way into the female apartments on some
pretense. If I find the ring, all is well: but if not, this Turk will
discover that I have been making a fool of him. However, as he is a
favorite at court, and can not but know in what flattering estimation I
am held there, he will probably treat me with the distinction I deserve.
In fine, I will try it. Will you come, too? you can help me in my
incantations, which will serve as an excuse." The proposal was too
tempting to be rejected, and at the hour agreed on we set off in such
state as we could command (in the East, state is essential to respect),
jogging over the rough streets, in one of those hearse-like carriages
without springs, which bring one's bones upon terms of far too intimate
a mutual acquaintance.

We reached at last a gate, which promised little; but ere long we found
ourselves in one of those "high-walled gardens, green and old," which
are among the glories of the East. Passing between rows of orange and
lemon-trees, we reached the house, where we were received by a goodly
retinue of slaves, and conducted, accompanied by our dragoman, through a
long suite of apartments. In the last of them stood a tall, handsome,
and rather youthful man, in splendid attire, who welcomed us with a
grave courtesy. We took our seats, and were presented in due form with
long pipes, and with coffee, to me far more acceptable. After a
sufficient interval of time had passed for the most meditative and
abstracted of men to remember his purpose, our host, reminded of what he
had apparently forgotten by my companion's conjuring robes, an
electrical machine, and other instruments of incantation, which the
slaves carried from our carriage, civilly inquired when we intended to
commence operations. "What operations?" demanded my companion, with much
apparent unconcern. "The discovery of the ring." "Whenever his highness
pleased, and it suited the female part of his household to make their
appearance," was the answer.

At this startling proposition even the Oriental sedateness of our
majestic host gave way, and he allowed his astonishment and displeasure
to become visible. "Who ever heard," he demanded, "of the wives of a
true believer being shown to a stranger, and that stranger an Infidel
and a Frank?" As much astonished in our turn, we demanded, "When a
magician had ever been heard of, who could discover a stolen treasure
without being confronted either with the person who had lost or the
person who had appropriated it?" For at least two hours, though
relieved by intervals of silence, the battle was carried on with much
occasional vehemence on his part, and on ours with an assumption of
perfect indifference. Our host at last, perceiving that our obstinacy
was equal to the decrees of Fate, retired, as we were informed, to
consult his mother on the subject. In a few minutes he returned, and
assured us that our proposition was ridiculous; upon which we rose with
much dignified displeasure, and moved toward the door, stating that our
beards had been made little of. A grave-looking man who belonged to the
household of our host, and occupied apparently a sort of
semi-ecclesiastical position, now interposed, and after some
consultation it was agreed that as we were not mere men, but prophets,
and infidel saints, an exception might be made in our favor without
violation of the Mussulman law; not, indeed, to the extent of allowing
us to profane the inner sanctuary of the harem with our presence, but so
far as to admit us into in apartment adjoining it, where the women would
be summoned to attend us.

Accordingly, we passed through a long suite of rooms, and at last found
ourselves in a chamber lofty and large, fanned by a breeze from the
Bosphorus, over which its lattices were suspended, skirted by a low
divan, covered with carpets and cushions, and "invested with purpureal
gleams" by the splendid hangings through which the light feebly strove.
Among a confused heap of crimson pillows and orange drapery, at the
remote end of the apartment, sat, or rather reclined, the mother of our
reluctant host. I could observe only that she was aged, and lay there as
still as if she had belonged to the vegetable, not the human world.
Usually she was half-vailed by the smoke of her long pipe; but when its
wreaths chanced to float aside or grow thin, her dark eyes were fixed
upon us with an expression half indifferent and half averse.

Presently a murmur of light feet was heard in an adjoining chamber: on
it moved along the floor of the gallery; and in trooped the company of
wives and female slaves. They laughed softly and musically as they
entered, but seemed frightened also; and at once raising their shawls
and drawing down their vails, they glided simultaneously into a
semicircle, and stood there with hands folded on their breasts. I sat
opposite to them, drinking coffee and smoking, or pretending to smoke a
pipe eight feet long: at one side stood the Mollah and some male members
of the household: at the other stood the handsome husband, apparently
but little contented with the course matters had taken; and my friend,
the magician, moved about among the implements of his art clad in a
black gown spangled with flame-colored devices, strange enough to strike
a bold heart with awe. Beyond the semicircle stood two children, a boy
and a girl, holding in their hands twisted rods of barley-sugar about a
yard long each, which they sucked assiduously the whole time of our
visit. There they stood, mute and still as statues, with dark eyes
fixed, now on us, and now on the extremity of their sugar wands.

My companion commenced operations by displaying a number of conjuring
tricks intended to impress all present with the loftiest opinion of his
powers, and stopped every now and then to make his dragoman explain that
it would prove in vain to endeavor to deceive a being endowed with such
gifts. To these expositions the women apparently paid but little
attention; but the conjuring feats delighted them; and again and again
they laughed until, literally, the head of each dropped on her
neighbor's shoulder. After a time the husband, who alone had never
appeared the least entertained, interposed, and asked the conjuror
whether he had yet discovered the guilty party. With the utmost
coolness, my friend replied, "Certainly not: how could he while His
Highness's wives continued vailed?" This new demand created new
confusion and a long debate: I thought, however, that the women seemed
rather to advocate our cause. The husband, the Mollah, and the mother
again consulted; and in another moment the vails had dropped, and the
beauty of many an Eastern nation stood before us revealed.

Four of those unvailed Orientals were, as we were informed, wives, and
six were slaves. The former were beautiful indeed, though beautiful in
different degrees and in various styles of beauty: of the latter two
only. They were, all of them, tall, slender, and dark-eyed, "shadowing
high beauty in their airy brows," and uniting a mystical with a
luxurious expression, like that of Sibyls who had been feasting with
Cleopatra. There was something to me strange as well as lovely in their
aspect--as strange as their condition, which seems a state half-way
between marriage and widowhood. They see no man except their husband;
and a visit from him (except in the case of the favorite) is a rare and
marvelous occurrence, like an eclipse of the sun. Their bearing toward
each other was that of sisters: in their movements I remarked an
extraordinary sympathy, which was the more striking on account of their
rapid transitions from the extreme of alarm to child-like wonder, and
again to boundless mirth.

The favorite wife was a Circassian, and a fairer vision it would not be
easy to see. Intellectual in expression she could hardly be called; yet
she was full of dignity, as well as of pliant grace and of sweetness.
Her large black eyes, beaming with a soft and stealthy radiance, seemed
as if they would have yielded light in the darkness; and the heavy waves
of her hair, which, in the excitement of the tumultuous scene, she
carelessly flung over her shoulders, gleamed like a mirror. Her
complexion was the most exquisite I have ever seen, its smooth and
pearly purity being tinged with a color, unlike that of flower or of
fruit, of bud or of berry, but which reminded me of the vivid and
delicate tints which sometimes streak the inside of a shell. Though tall
she seemed as light as if she had been an embodied cloud, hovering over
the rich carpets like a child that does not feel the weight of its body;
and though stately in the intervals of rest, her mirth was a sort of
rapture. She, too, had that peculiar luxuriousness of aspect, in no
degree opposed to modesty, which belongs to the East: around her lips
was wreathed, in their stillness, an expression at once pleasurable and
pathetic, which seemed ever ready to break forth into a smile: her hands
seemed to leave with regret whatever they had rested on, and in parting
to leave something behind; and in all her soft and witching beauty she
reminded me of Browning's lines--

    "No swan-soft woman, rubbed in lucid oils.
    The gift of an enamored god, more fair."

As feat succeeded to feat, and enchantment to enchantment, all remnant
of reserve was discarded, and no trace remained of that commingled alarm
and pleased expectation which had characterized those beaming
countenances when first they emerged from their vails. Those fair women
floated around us, and tossed their hands in the air, wholly forgetting
that their husband was by. Still, however, we had made but little
progress in our inquiry; and when the magician informed them that they
had better not try to conceal any thing from him, their only answer was
a look that said, "You came here to give us pleasure, not to
cross-question us." Resolved to use more formidable weapons, he began to
arrange an electrical machine, when the Mollah, after glancing at it two
or three times, approached and asked him whether that instrument also
was supernatural. The quick-witted Frenchman replied at once, "By no
means; it is a mere scientific toy." Then, turning to me, he added, in a
low voice, "He has seen it before--probably, he has traveled." In a few
minutes, the women were ranged in a ring, and linked hand-in-hand. He
then informed them, through our interpreter, that if a discovery was not
immediately made, each person should receive, at the same moment, a blow
from an invisible hand; that, the second time, the admonition would be
yet severer; and that, the third time, if his warning was still
despised, the culprit would drop down dead. This announcement was heard
with much gravity, but no confession followed it: the shock was given,
and the lovely circle was speedily dislinked, "with shrieks and
laughter." Again the shock was given, and with the same effect; but this
time the laughter was more subdued. Before making his last essay, the
magician addressed them in a long speech, telling them that he had
already discovered the secret, that if the culprit confessed, he would
make intercession for her, but that, if she did not, she must take the
consequences. Still no confession was made. For the first time, my
confident friend looked downcast. "It will not do," he said to me; "the
ring can not be recovered: they know nothing about it: probably it was
lost. We can not fulfill our engagement; and, indeed, I wish," he added,
"that we were well out of all this."

I confess I wished the same, especially when I glanced at the master of
the household, who stood apart, gloomy as a thunder-cloud, and with the
look of a man who thinks himself in a decidedly false position. The
Easterns do not understand a jest, especially in a harem; and not being
addicted to irony (that great safety-valve for enthusiasm), they pass
rapidly from immovability to very significant and sometimes disagreeable
action. Speaking little, they deliver their souls by acting. I should
have been glad to hear our host talk, even though in a stormy voice: on
the whole, however, I trusted much to the self-possession and address of
my associate. Nor was I deceived. "Do as you see me do," he said to me
and the dragoman; and then, immediately after giving the third shock,
which was as ineffectual as those that preceded it, he advanced to our
grim host with a face radiant with satisfaction, and congratulated him
vehemently. "You are a happy man," he said. "Your household has not a
flaw in it. Fortunate it was that you sent for the wise man: I have
discovered the matter." "What have you discovered?" "The fate of the
ring. It has never been stolen: if it had, I would have restored it to
you. Fear nothing; your household is trustworthy and virtuous. I know
where the ring is; but I should deceive you if I bade you hope ever to
find it again. This is a great mystery, and the happy consummation
surpasses even my hopes. Adieu. The matter has turned out just as you
see. You were born under a lucky star. Happy is the man whose household
is trustworthy, and who, when his faith is tried, finds a faithful
counselor. I forbid you, henceforth and forever, to distrust any one of
your wives."

It would be impossible to describe the countenance of our Mussulman
friend during this harangue. There he stood, like a tree half in
sunshine and half in shade; gratification struggling with displeasure in
his countenance, and wonder eclipsing both. It was not by any means our
policy to wait until he had adjusted the balance, and made up his mind
as to the exact degree of gratitude he owed his guests. On, accordingly,
we passed to the door. In a moment the instinct of courtesy prevailed,
and our host made a sign to one of his retinue. His slaves preceded us
with torches (it had grown late); and, accompanied by half the
household, as a guard of honor, we again traversed the large and
straggling house, passed through the garden, and entered the carriage
which waited for us beyond the wall. Our evening passed rapidly away as
we discussed our adventure; and I have more than once thought, with
pleasure, how amusing an incident the visit of the strangers must have
been to the secluded beauties. No doubt the baths of Constantinople have
rung with many a merry laugh occasioned by this invasion of the Franks.
Never, perhaps, have the inmates of a harem seen so much of the infidel
before, and conversed with him so familiarly, in the presence of their
husband.




[From Sharpe's Magazine.]

THE WIFE OF KONG TOLV.[14]

A FAIRY TALE OF SCANDINAVIA.

BY THE AUTHOR "COLA MONTI."


Hyldreda Kalm stood at the door of her cottage, and looked abroad into
the quietness of the Sabbath morn. The village of Skjelskör lay at a
little distance down the vale, lighted by the sunshine of a Zealand
summer, which, though brief, is glowing and lovely even as that of the
south. Hyldreda had looked for seventeen years upon this beautiful
scene, the place where she was born. Sunday after Sunday she had stood
thus and listened for the distant tinkle of the church bell. A stranger,
passing by, might have said, how lovely were her face and form; but the
widowed mother, whose sole stay she was, and the little delicate sister,
who had been her darling from the cradle, would have answered, that if
none were so fair, none were likewise so good as Hyldreda; and that all
the village knew. If she did love to bestow greater taste and care on
her Sunday garments than most young damsels of her class, she had a
right--for was she not beautiful as any lady? And did not the eyes of
Esbern Lynge say so, when, week after week, he came up the hilly road,
and descended again to the little chapel, supporting the feeble mother's
slow steps, and watching his betrothed as she bounded on before, with
little Resa in her hand?

"Is Esbern coming?" said the mother's voice within.

"I know not--I did not look," answered Hyldreda, with a girlish
willfulness. "I saw only the sun shining on the river, and the oak-wood
waving in the breeze."

"Look down the road, child; the time passes. Go quickly."

"She is gone already," said Resa, laughing merrily. "She is standing
under the great elder-tree to wait for Esbern Lynge."

"Call her back--call her back!" cried the mother, anxiously. "To stand
beneath an elder-tree, and this night will be St. John's Eve! On Sunday,
too, and she a Sunday child! Call her quickly, Resa."

The little child lifted up her voice, "Hyld--"

"Not her name--utter not her name!" And the widow Kalm went on muttering
to herself, "Perhaps the Hyldemoer[15] will not have heard. Alas the
day! when my child was born under an elder-tree, and I, poor desolate
mother! was terrified into giving my babe that name. Great Hyldemoer, be
propitiated! Holy Virgin!" and the widow's prayer became a curious
mingling of superstition and piety, "Blessed Mary! let not the elves
have power over my child! Have I not kept her heart from evil? does not
the holy cross lie on her pure breast day and night? Do I not lead her
every Sunday, winter and summer, in storm, sunshine, or snow, to the
chapel in the valley? And this day I will say for her a double prayer."

The mother's counted beads had scarce come to an end when Hyldreda stood
by her side, and, following the light-footed damsel, came Esbern Lynge.

"Child, why didst thou linger under the tree?" said the widow. "It does
not become a young maiden to stand flaunting outside her door. Who wert
thou watching so eagerly?"

"Not thee, Esbern," laughed the girl, shaking her head at her betrothed,
who interposed with a happy conscious face; "I was looking at a grand
train that wound along the road, and thinking how pleasant it would be
to dress on a Sunday like the lady of the castle, and recline idly
behind four prancing horses instead of trudging on in these clumsy
shoes."

The mother frowned, and Esbern Lynge looked sorrowful.

"I wish I could give her all she longs for," sighed the young man, as
they proceeded on their way, his duteous arm supporting the widow, while
Hyldreda and Resa went bounding onward before them; "She is as beautiful
as a queen--I would that I could make her one."

"Wish rather, Esbern, that Heaven may make her a pious, lowly-hearted
maid, and, in good time, a wife; that she may live in humility and
content, and die in peace among her own people."

Esbern said nothing--he could not think of death and _her_ together. So
he and the widow Kalm walked on silently--and so slowly that they soon
lost sight of the two blithe sisters.

Hyldreda was talking merrily of the grand sight she had just seen, and
describing to little Resa the gilded coach, the prancing horses, with
glittering harness. "Oh! but it was a goodly train, as it swept down
toward the river. Who knows? Perhaps it may have been the king and queen
themselves."

"No," said little Resa, rather fearfully, "you know Kong Tolv[16] never
lets any mortal king pass the bridge of Skjelskör."

"_Kong Tolv!_ what, more stories about Kong Tolv!" laughed the merry
maiden; "I never saw him; I wish I could see him, for then I might
believe in thy tales, little one."

"Hush, hush!--But mother told me never to speak of these things to
thee," answered Resa; "unsay the wish, or some harm may come."

"I care not! who would heed these elfin tales on such a lovely day?
Look, Resa, down that sunny meadow, where there is a cloud shadow
dancing on the grass; a strange cloud it is too, for it almost resembles
a human form."

"It is Kong Tolv rolling himself in the sunshine," cried the trembling
child; "Look away, my sister, lest he should hear us."

Again Hyldreda's fearless laugh made music through the still air, and
she kept looking back until they passed from the open road into the
gloom of the oak wood.

"It is strange that thou shouldst be so brave," said Resa once more. "I
tremble at the very thought of the Elle-people of whom our villagers
tell, while thou hast not a single fear. Why is it, sister?"

"I know not, save that I never yet feared any thing," answered Hyldreda,
carelessly. "As for Kong Tolv, let him come, I care not."

While she spoke, a breeze swept through the oak wood, the trees began to
bend their tops, and the under branches were stirred with leafy
murmurings, as the young girl passed beneath. She lifted her fair face
to meet them. "Ah 'tis delicious, this soft scented wind; it touches my
face like airy kisses; it makes the leaves seem to talk to me in musical
whispers. Dost thou not hear them too, little Resa? and dost thou
not--?"

Hyldreda suddenly stopped, and gazed eagerly down the road.

"Well, sister," said Resa, "what art dreaming of now? Come, we shall be
late at church, and mother will scold." But the elder sister stood
motionless. "How strange thine eyes look; what dost thou see, Hyldreda."

"Look--what is there!"

"Nothing, but a cloud of dust that the wind sweeps forward. Stand back,
sister, or it will blind thee."

Still Hyldreda bent forward with admiring eyes, muttering, "Oh! the
grand golden chariot, with its four beautiful white hors

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