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

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.

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

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."

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!

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."

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."

[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.

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 Marbœuf, 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 Marbœuf, 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!

[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 manœuvre. 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 Hyldemoer¹⁵ 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 Tolv¹⁶ 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 horses! And therein sits a man – surely it is the king! and the lady beside him is the queen. See, she turns – "

Hyldreda paused, dumb with wonder, for despite the gorgeous show of jeweled attire, she recognized that face. It was the same she had looked at an hour before in the little cracked mirror. The lady in the carriage was the exact counterpart of herself!

The pageant came and vanished. Little Resa turned round and wiped her eyes – she, innocent child, had seen nothing but a cloud of dust. Her elder sister answered not her questionings, but remained silent, oppressed by a nameless awe. It passed not, even when the chapel was reached, and Hyldreda knelt to pray. Above the sound of the hymn she heard the ravishing music of the leaves in the oak wood, and instead of the priest she seemed to behold the two dazzling forms which had sat side by side in the golden chariot.

When service was ended, and all went homewards, she lingered under the trees where the vision, or reality, whichever it was, had met her sight, half longing for its reappearance. But her mother whispered something to Esbern, and they hurried Hyldreda away.

She laid aside her Sunday mantle, the scarlet woof which to spin, weave, and fashion, had cost her a world of pains. How coarse and ugly it seemed! She threw it contemptuously aside, and thought how beautiful looked the purple-robed lady, who was so like herself.

"And why should I not be as fair as she? I should, if I were only dressed as fine. Heaven might as well have made me a lady, instead of a poor peasant girl."

These repinings entered the young heart hitherto so pure and happy. They haunted her even when she rejoined her mother, Resa, and Esbern Lynge. She prepared the noonday meal, but her step was heavy and her hand unwilling. The fare seemed coarse, the cottage looked dark and poor. She wondered what sort of a palace home was that owned by the beautiful lady; and whether the king, if king the stranger were, presided at his banquet table as awkwardly as did Esbern Lynge at the mean board here.

At the twilight, Hyldreda did not steal out as usual to talk with her lover beneath the rose-porch. She went and hid herself out of his sight, under the branches of the great elder-tree, which to her had always a strange charm, perhaps because it was the spot of all others where she was forbidden to stay. However, this day Hyldreda began to feel herself to be no longer a child, but a woman whose will was free.

She sat under the dreamy darkness of the heavy foliage. Its faint sickly odor overpowered her like a spell. Even the white bunches of elder flowers seemed to grow alive in the twilight, and to change into faces, looking at her whithersoever she turned. She shut her eyes, and tried to summon back the phantom of the golden chariot, and especially of the king-like man who sat inside. Scarce had she seen him clearly, but she felt he looked a king. If wishing could bring to her so glorious a fortune, she would almost like to have, in addition to the splendors of rich dress and grand palaces, such a noble-looking man for her lord and husband.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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6

Naseby, June 14, 1646.

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7

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

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8

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

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9

Madame Campan's Memoirs.

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10

Madame de Staël.

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11

Bertrand de Moleville.

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12

De Levis.

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13

De Ferrieres.

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14

The idea of this story is partly taken from a Danish Visa, or legendary ballad, entitled "Proud Margaret."

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15

Hyldemoer, elder-mother, is the name of a Danish elf inhabiting the elder-tree. Eda signifies a grandmother or female ancestor. Children born on Sundays were especially under the power of the elves.

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16

Kong Tolv, or King Twelve, is one of the Elle-kings who divide the fairy sovereignty of Zealand.

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