did. Depones, that if he could have hindered his son from going to

America he would have done it; and if he had known as much then as he does now, he would have done it. Depones, that before he promised to return his son to the said ship as above, he was himself threatened to be put into the Tolbooth."

The line of defence adopted by the kidnappers was, that no one was forced, in the first instance; that each boy was the object of a distinct agreement, either with his parents or with himself; and the subsequent coercion employed towards them, which could not be denied, was thus interpreted to be a judicious protection by the employers of the property they had fairly acquired. But the very evidence given by their own emissaries--almost every sentence bearing in its bosom a general assurance that nothing illegal was done--is quite sufficient in the description of minute facts to support, if not confirm, the darkest suspicions. Thus one of the crimps, desiring to excite some feeling against the exiles, as a graceless inconsiderate class, unworthy of sympathy, said "that such persons, whether boys or older people, whom the deponent engaged to go to America on board the said ship, the Planter, after they had been--some four, some five, some six weeks clothed and maintained by him at the expense of his employers, were endeavouring to desert and run away, and were tampered with, or decoyed to engage or take on with other people in the town of Aberdeen, who were, at the very same time, engaging and indenting servants to America; and, in order to prevent their being so decoyed, the older people so engaged by the deponent were put in prison, and the younger people were put into the workhouse or poor's hospital." There was, it seems, much competition in the trade; and, at the same time, the live commodity had a propensity to remove itself from the custody of its owners. Thus might the employment be termed a doubly hazardous one; and a certain scrupulous citizen, who had grave doubts about the propriety of joining the speculation, though he wished to be a part-owner of the ship in which it was conducted, gave this account of his hesitation: "Having been informed that servants had been indented by Ragg and his owners to go on board of his said ship to America, and the deponent not inclining to be concerned in that _servant trade_, proposed to Ragg to hold a share of the ship if he was to have no concern of that adventure of the servants, as he was an utter stranger _to any merchandise or trade in that way_; to which Robert Ragg said, that he could not have any concern with the ship without having a concern in the servants, which made him break up any farther communing with Ragg about the matter." But this witness was an instance of the instability of good resolutions: he was strongly pressed by friends for whom he had a high esteem; the profits and advantages of the undertaking--but that, of course, was a secondary matter--were largely spoken of in support of these importunities, "to hold a share in the same way as the other owners had done, as well in the adventure of the servants as in the ship,--to which importunities the deponent at last yielded." Not less tell-tale is a letter by the captain of the vessel, written in a spirit of honest indignation to one of the parties involved in the legal proceedings.

"Dear Sir,--I am favoured with yours of the 28th September, and am sorry you are put to trouble about one Williamson. I do not remember any of that name that went out in the Planter, and am certain, if he is not mentioned in _the account of what was got for the servants' indentures_," [that is to say, of course, for the sale of the 'servants' themselves,] "if even he was ever indented, he must have run away at Aberdeen, or at Cape May, where the ship was lost: and I am sure there was no servant in that ship but what was legally attested before they went from Aberdeen. I cannot tell _if any register is kept at Philadelphia of the sale of servants_, but I imagine not."

These admissions, that the "servants" required coercion; that they were confined in the public prison and other convenient places; and that they were _sold_, are of course, amply confirmed by the witnesses on the other side. A witness, William Jamieson, had a pathetic little history of his own to tell. He lived in the village of Old Meldrum, in the year 1740, and he had then a son John, between ten and eleven years old. One evening his boy did not come home; and in the course of his anxious inquiries, next day, about the missing youth, he was told by some neighbours, "that they saw a man, whom they said was a servant to John Burnet, late merchant in Aberdeen, who was commonly called Bonny John, with the deponent's said son, and two other boys, much about the same age, travelling towards Aberdeen, and that his son would be sent to the plantations." The kind of alarm that would be conveyed to the father's heart by such an intimation, may be imagined; and the poor villager, surrounded by people among whom a dread of this species of kidnapping had become a panic, would be little relieved from his anxieties, by hearing the neighbours describe the horrors of the slavery to which such of their offspring as underwent the calamity of capture were subjected, and lament their utter feebleness to resist the strong hand, fortified by law and authority, by which the injury was perpetrated. Jamieson, however, resolved to make an effort for his son. He went presently to Aberdeen, and saw Burnet, who apparently transacted too large a business in the "servant trade," to be conscious of so small an item in the account as the villager's son, "and told him that he had several boys, but did not know whether the deponent's son was amongst them; but said, though he was, the deponent would not get him back, because he was engaged with him." The "deponent"--a word which in Scotland is the technical term for witness; we are sorry that it is necessary to use it so often, but we cannot help it--after his interview with the great kidnapper, wandered along the broad links or downs on the sea-shore, "where he had been informed the boys were out getting the air." There "he observed a great number of boys--he thinks about sixty: that they were attended by a man who, the deponent was informed by the people of the town, was employed for the purpose by the said John Burnet; that this man had a horsewhip, and the deponent observed him striking the boys therewith, when they went out of the crowd." The poor man saw his own boy John in the little herd, and joyfully hailed him. The boy, by a natural impulse, ran to his father, and said he would gladly follow him home if he dared. "Immediately upon this, the person who was Mr Burnet's overseer, came up and gave the boy a lash with his whip, and took him by the shoulder and carried him amongst the rest, and immediately drove them off." The father kept company with the procession, and thus describes its progress.

"When the boys were marching up to the barn, the deponent kept pace with the overseer, who followed immediately after the boys, entreating of him to get liberty to speak to his son; who answered him that he should get leave to speak to him by-and-by, when they were come to the barn; but when they came there the overseer locked the door, and refused the deponent access; _that he never saw his son after this_. That the deponent in passing through the town of Aberdeen, after his son was so locked up from him, was told by several tradespeople, and others to whom he had told the story of his son, that it would be in vain for him to apply to the magistrates to get his son liberated, because some of the magistrates had a hand in those things, as well as the said John Burnet; upon which the deponent went home."

A very characteristic record of these transactions still remained in the books and accounts of the parties implicated. Among these documents, one of the witnesses, denominated "Walter Scott, writer to the signet," produces "the ship book," apparently the same which some of the witnesses more descriptively call "the kidnapping book." It is needless to say whose father it was who possessed this curious document. The investigation occurred in 1762--nine years before the birth of Sir Walter; and it was perhaps one of the last ideas that would have ever occurred to his respectable parent, that it was worth while communicating to his offspring any information from a mere merchant's account book, which had been placed in his hands in the usual routine of his business, and probably afterwards forgotten. Yet what a lively history might have been woven out of its dry materials, had it remained among the other lumber in George Square, to be rummaged out by the lame boy! Mr Scott was the agent for the kidnappers. It is satisfactory to observe that he appears to have been too honest an agent for their purposes; for we find that he transmitted to them this book by post, in order that it might be exhibited in the course of the arbitration, to which we shall hereafter allude; but his employers knew their own interest too well to produce it, until they were subsequently compelled to do so.

The extracts from the books transferred to the papers before us, are of course those only which have some reference to the case of Peter Williamson; thus--

"Jan. 8, 1743. To a pair of stockings s. d. to Peter Williamson 0 6 To a woollen cap to ditto 0 5 13, To five days of ditto 1 3

And a more emphatical entry--

"To the man that brought Williamson 1 6

_Listing_ appears to have been the slang, or, more properly speaking, the business term for kidnapping, and the price of the operation passes through a scale of sums, graduated probably to the difficulty of the task. Thus, while Williamson was procured for 1s. 6d., there is an entry "To a Serjeant for listing Mackie, 5s.;" while on the other hand, there is only "1s. 4½d. to Lighton and a soldier for listing Robert Paterson." There is one sweeping charge of a guinea, "to Maclean, sent to the country to list servants,"--amount of business done not stated, but it must have been considerable, as there are occasional entries of "cash sent to the country to Maclean." Sometimes sums are entered as paid to the parties themselves--as 5s. "to Margaret Robertson, when listed;" yet this can scarcely have been a voluntary operation on Margaret's part, as the immediate succeeding item is 1s. 6d. "to the wright on board and one of the boys for listing her." Five shillings are entered as "to two soldiers for listing Allardyce." He must have been a difficult boy to catch, as there is a further entry of 2s., as "cash they spent with him."

This item introduces us to a dark feature in the expenditure of the kidnappers,--the sums that appear to have been spent by them in vicious indulgences to their young captives, to prevent the tedium of their imprisonment, from driving them to desperate efforts for their escape. We have thus,--"to the boys to play at cards, 1s.;" and in another place, "to the boys to drink, when put in the workhouse, 1s.; to six packs of cards to them, 9d." It is almost a relief in the perusal of these heartless business-like columns--every red line of which has the hard outline of premeditated cruelty--to read of 1s. 6d. being paid "to the piper for playing in the workhouse two days." But in the neighbourhood of this, there are some entries which we dare not copy. There is a candid explicitness about these accounts, which we must confess that we have not sufficient virtuous courage to imitate, by transferring to our columns some charges, of which we would yet fain give our readers an idea. The person who kept the books no doubt "called a spade a spade;" and, indeed, he bestowed on many other things their ordinary vulgar nomenclature. We tremble in approaching his most explicit declarations; we almost fear reproach in offering to the reader an extract of an item, in which he has been very decorous, considering the subject; but such an item! who shall explain its meaning? Here it is--"To Colonel Horsie for his concubine, £1!"

Some entries referring to "the boys in the Tolbooth," or, more briefly, the prisoners," remind us, were this necessary, that these accounts related to persons kept in bondage. Other parts indicate the comprehensive nature of the business done in "the servant trade." Thus, on the 12th of May, there is a charge of 7s. 6d. "to three days' board of ten servants from the Tolbooth;" and on the same day, "to five days' board of thirty-four servants, £2, 2s. 6d." The latter number is frequently repeated in the account, and probably represents the stock of one considerable holder. It was estimated by the witnesses that sixty-nine were transported in one cargo in 1743; "and when," says a writer already alluded to, "it is considered that the trade was carried on to an equal extent for nearly six years, it is impossible to estimate the number of unhappy beings carried off at less than six hundred.[20]

[20] _Book of Bon Accord_, 90.

We have endeavoured in our account of these transactions to be sternly and rigidly prosaic,--perhaps our readers may think we have no great merit in accomplishing such a resolution, but we also take merit for having adhered to the facts attested with impartial accuracy. To afford some relief to the plainness of our detail, we shall wind it up by treating the reader to a part of the eloquent and denunciatory exordium of Williamson's counsel, Maclaurin, brother of the great mathematician.

"Persons of every character, sex, and age, were kidnapped,--men, women, half-grown lads, and infants, some of them not above six years old. The whole country was in terror and consternation, afraid to let their children go near Aberdeen, and trembling for fear of a kidnapping excursion from that place. The unfortunate creatures that had been wheedled or pressed into the service, were at first confined in a barn or workhouse, where they had a piper to play to them, and cards allowed them, in order to hinder them to think, or meditate their escape; but that they soon attempted, and one or two of them with success; upon which the rest were shut up in the Tolbooth.

"During their confinement, the parents and other relations of those who had been enticed or forced away, flocked to Aberdeen in hopes of effectuating their release,--hopes which they would never have entertained had they reflected that the town-clerk and one of the bailies were deeply interested to thwart them. Accordingly, no entreaties or solicitations availed; and those who seemed too importunate were threatened themselves with banishment, incarceration, and other distress. It will readily occur that it is much easier to imagine than describe the scenes which it is in proof ensued; for nothing more piteous and moving can well be figured than to see fathers and mothers running frantic through the streets, crowding to the doors and windows where their children were imprisoned, there giving them their blessing, taking farewell of them for ever, and departing in anguish and despair, imprecating curses upon those who were the authors of their misery."

So much for the first step,--the catching of the prey.

We have some farther testimony to the judicious strictness with which the worshipful merchants protected their property after it was stowed away; but we do not hear that their "cargo of young lads," as one of them calls it in a confidential letter, was insured. William Wilson, one of the sailors, testified, however,--"that there were several men in the ship besides the sailors, and also several boys and girls; that he saw these boys and girls put on board; that they were brought to the ship in a boat, and were guarded by a number of porters from Aberdeen, who continued to guard them all night till the ship sailed, going home always in the morning and returning at night; that during the day they were guarded by the ship's crew, the one half of whom did the duty of the ship, and the other half took care of the boys and girls, notwithstanding whereof two of them made their escape. Some of these boys appeared to the deponent to be about fourteen years of age, some to be about sixteen or eighteen, and others not to exceed ten or twelve years of age; that after the boys were put on board, the hatches of the ship were put down and locked every night, both while the ship continued in the harbour of Aberdeen, and afterwards when she was at sea."

It will naturally occur to the reader, that though the magistrates and other public officers of a corporation might combine together to perpetrate such acts, they could not carry their authority across the Atlantic, or compel the governors of the foreign possessions of the crown to acknowledge the brand of slavery they had set upon their captives. This naturally suggested itself to us from the beginning, as throwing a doubt over the essential movements of the transaction; but it was speedily cleared away by discoveries very creditable to the ingenuity, if to no other quality, of these astute burgesses. Every captive was indented in the presence of a magistrate,--the captor himself, of course, or some other person engaged in "the servant trade"--and that for a limited number of years. The indenture was certified and transmitted to the place of destination. This expedient brought each captive within the colonial code, which applied very rigorous rules to indented emigrants,--rules which virtually placed them in the category of slaves. These harsh regulations were justified by the circumstance that the class generally consisted of convicts--indenture being the form in which criminals obtained the alternative of transportation as a mitigation of some more dreaded punishment. When the emigrant arrived at Virginia, the ceremony by which he was sold was an assignment of his indenture. This could, of course, only convey a right to the labour of his body for a limited period; but as the convict emigrants required to be under a very potent discipline, powers were put into the hands of the planters by which they were enabled to protract the indented period; and Williamson himself describes with apparent accuracy,--"the children sent off and sold, no doubt to cruel masters, whose ill treatment obliges them often-times to elope to avoid slavery; and as there is no probability of making their escape, as they are always taken and brought back, and for every day they are away from their master they serve a week, and for every week a month, and for every month a year; besides obliged to pay all costs and charges that is advertised for apprehending them, which will probably bring him in a slave for four or five years longer at least."

We shall now, in the briefest shape, give an outline of Williamson's adventures, as detailed by himself, between his removal from the country, and his return to vex his oppressors with multiform litigation.

The vessel stranded on a sand bank at the mouth of the Delaware, and was for some time deserted by its crew, the cargo of boys being left to an anticipated fate, which Williamson says he often in his subsequent miseries wished had really overtaken them. Being afterwards taken on shore, they were relieved by a vessel sailing to Philadelphia, where they were sold "at about £16 per head." "What became of my unhappy companions," says Williamson, "I never knew; but it was my lot to be sold to one of my countrymen, whose name was Hugh Wilson, a North Briton, for the term of seven years, who had in youth undergone the same fate as myself.... Happy was my lot in falling into my countryman's power, as he was, contrary to many others of his calling, a humane, worthy, honest man. Having no children of his own, and commiserating my unhappy condition, he took care of me until I was fit for business." He was allowed by his indulgent master occasionally to attend a school, where he picked up some crumbs of education; and finally, at the age of seventeen, he became the old gentleman's heir. After a few vagrant years he married, and settled as a substantial planter near the forks of the Delaware. He was in a place much exposed to the inroads of the French Indians, who, he tells us, in the spirit of the military profession to which he was subsequently attached, "generally appeared in small skulking parties, with yellings, shoutings, and antic postures, instead of trumpets and drums." In one of these inroads they burned his comfortable dwelling and substantial steadings, and carried him off captive. All the world knows what is conveyed in the simple statement of such a fact; and Williamson's description of the tortures he underwent impart little additional horror to the simple announcement of his seizure. It is possible to discern people's nature in their own account of their actions; and not unfrequently do we see the brave man in the description of dangers avoided, as we do the poltroon in the exaggerated account of those courted and overcome. Williamson's narrative conveys the irresistible impression that he was a man of eminently firm nerve, undying hope, and unconquerable energy--such a character as the Indian tribe would respect, and, after a sufficient trial, desire to incorporate with itself. Hence, while others are slowly slaughtered, Williamson is still permitted to live, struggle, and endure. In the difference between his own trials, terrible as they were, and the ignominious brutalities heaped on a poor fellow captive, who met his fate with gentleness, prayers, and weeping, we see the indication of the savage respect paid to the unbroken spirit of the Aberdonian, whose body they might rend inch by inch, but whose spirit remained firm and impenetrable as his native granite. At length, after several months of wandering, he made his escape; and the manner in which he did so was in keeping with his resolute spirit. He planned no stratagems, and consulted no confederates, but fled outright; and, though naked, emaciated, and ignorant of the country, defeated his pursuers by sheer fleetness of foot and endurance of fatigue. Profusely bleeding--without even such a verdant show of clothing as Ulysses endowed himself with when he met Nausica--emaciated to the last extremity, he somewhat astonished and also alarmed a female neighbour by an unceremonious morning call, dropping exhausted on the floor ere he could communicate or receive intelligence. Little need had he too speedily to recover his faculties; the first news he heard was that his broken-hearted wife had not long survived the calamity of his capture. He seems to have now acquired a decided taste for vagrant habits, mingled with a spirit of vindictive animosity towards the Indians, against whom he records several exterminating onsets with a sort of horrible relish. He enlisted himself as a soldier. But American warfare then allowed a far wider latitude for varied military operations than the ordinary experience of the ranks: and sometimes he was an Indian warrior, patiently unravelling and following up a trail; at another time we find him commanding a detachment of colonists as one versed in the native mode of fighting, with the rank and emoluments of a lieutenant. In his little book he details his various military adventures with much spirit and apparent truthfulness. We have from his pen a description of one enterprise, which is a little romance in itself. A lover, hearing that the home of the object of his affections has been desolated, and his beloved carried off by a band of one of the most formidable of the tribes of predatory Indians, in his frantic zeal raises a party of adventurers, with whom he tracks their path. He arrives just in time to save the damsel from the worst horrors of such a fate, and the marauders are put to the sword. The whole narrative has an animation and interest not unworthy of Cooper, who appears to have been acquainted with Williamson's book, and may not improbably have derived from it a part of his information about the military operations of Vaudreuil and Montcalm with the Indians in the French interest. Williamson was indeed a captive at that capitulation of Oswego which has cast so deep a stain on the honour of this commander, and he was soon afterwards sent to England as an exchanged prisoner. He complains that, on his voyage, "though the French behaved with a good deal of politeness, we were almost starved for want of provisions." He arrived at Plymouth in November 1765, and, owing to a severe wound in one of his hands, was discharged as incapable of farther service.

No longer able to apply his energies to Indian warfare, he looked around him for that employment which in his native country would best supply its place, and found it to be--literature. He published "A Brief Account of the War in North America, showing the principal causes of our former miscarriages; as also the necessity and advantage of keeping Canada, and maintaining a friendly correspondence with the Indians." This pamphlet is dated in 1760; and we here mention it, that we may not allow it to interrupt the narrative of the somewhat momentous consequences of a little book which he published two years later, with the title "French and Indian cruelty exemplified, in the Life and various Vicissitudes of fortune of Peter Williamson: containing a particular account of the manners, customs, and dress, of the savages; of their scalping, burning, and other barbarities committed on the English in North America, &c., &c." Mr Williamson was somewhat prolix in his title pages, and we cannot inflict the whole of this one on the reader. It was dedicated, with considerable sagacity, to William Pitt. In the frontispiece there is a full-length portrait of "Mr Peter Williamson, in the dress of a Delaware Indian." Much as Catlin's book and other works have tended to make us acquainted of late with Indian customs, the drapery of this portrait carries with it a decided appearance of accuracy, and attention to detail. The face is probably a likeness. Divest it of the feathered head-gear, it is that of a hard-featured inhabitant of the north-east coast, somewhat impregnated with an air of fierceness and excitement. Contemplate the entire figure: it is certainly a very fair representation of the Indian, such as we have seen him in the few importations exhibited in this country. For several years this representation was one of the main attractions of the booksellers' windows in Scotland; and many an infant has the careless parent or ignorant nurse frightened into constitutional nervousness, by the intimation that the wild man, whose picture had been seen during the morning walks, would appear to the infant in the dark, and visit his misdeeds with some mysterious punishment. Besides the occupation of the literary man, Williamson pursued that of the actor. During the day he sat behind a stall, vending his account of his adventures--in the evening he rehearsed them in the largest room of some popular tavern; where, like Catlin, he made the people acquainted with the costume and habits of the people, of whom he had acquired that acute experience which boys are said to have obtained of the boundary marks where they have been whipped.

In a moment of infatuation, the magistrates of Aberdeen, finding that the interest attached to Williamson's narrative and exhibitions subjected them to unpleasant reflections, resolved to punish him. He had migrated northwards, creating a little public curiosity and wonder wherever he went, until, on reaching his native city, he was brought before the magistrates, charged with a libel on the community, contained in that passage descriptive of his seizure on the pier of Aberdeen, which has been already quoted. The magistrates, being at once the prosecutors and the judges, had little difficulty in committing him; and he was thus very roughly awakened from a dream in which he "began to think himself happy in having endured these misfortunes, a recital of which promised to put him in a more prosperous situation than he had ever hoped for." The stock in hand of his books, amounting to three hundred and fifty copies, was seized and burned in the market-place by the common hangman, and he was committed to prison until he should sign a recantation of the passage containing the account of the kidnapping. The mind that bore up against the fiercest cruelties of the savages, seems to have bowed before these judicial terrors. In the centre of the torturing hordes, without a civilised eye to look on him, he acquired the stern virtues of those on whom he looked--

"Impassive, fearing but the shame of fear, A stoic of the woods, a man without a tear."

Among his own people, beneath the shield of British justice, with a public to whom oppression never appeals in vain he sank unmanned; and in utter prostration of spirit he signed the recantation in the terms in which it was desired, and marched out of prison a heartbroken and ruined man.

But the cup of the iniquities of his oppressors was now full, and their hour of retribution was at hand. The blow dealt against them was not so severe as injured justice might have required, but it was dealt with an ignominious scorn that made compensation for its want of severity. There were at that time many men of high spirit and great attainments in the Scottish bar. They knew that the age they belonged to was one, in which the safety of the public liberties was intimately allied with the independence of the bar. It was not an uncommon practice for a few of the ablest and most popular advocates to unite together in vindication of the victim of some formidable system of oppression; and, fortunately for Williamson, his case attracted their generous interest. Andrew Crosbie, the prototype of Scott's Pleydell, threw his whole energies, and they were not small, into this cause. The pleadings at our bar at that time were full of philosophy, general declamation, and poetry; and we have before us some papers from Crosbie's pen which are brilliant and pleasing specimens of this class of forensic rhetoric. At the present day the rhetoric of the law appeals only to the jury, and in the shape of vocal oratory. In the days of our grandfathers it was addressed to the learned bench, and was embodied in carefully prepared written pleadings. The intellectual rank of the audience to be influenced, and the medium of communication, would thus naturally invest the pleadings of these old lawyers with a literary turn, not equalled in the corresponding productions of this age. So we find that Crosbie bursts open the case with these well-turned periods:--

"That liberty which the constitution of this country considers as its favourite object, is the result of the due equipoise which our law has established between the authority of magistrates and the rights of the people. As the relative duties of society must be enforced by the magistrate, and compliance with the laws exacted from the citizens by means of his authority, all the power that is necessary for these salutary purposes is bestowed upon him; and, in the due execution of it, he is not only entitled to the protection of the law, but is an object of its veneration. Yet the same principles that have thus armed him with authority, for the benefit of society, have wisely imposed on him a restraint from abusing it."

The result of these proceedings was, that, in 1762, the Court unanimously awarded to Williamson damages to the extent of £100; and it was declared that, for this sum as well as £80 of costs, the guilty individuals should be personally liable, "and that the same shall be no burden upon the town of Aberdeen." A corporation is a sort of ideal object; it has no personality; it has been pronounced, by a high authority, to have no conscience; it has just one reality about it--it has a purse. Into this purse its members may have been accustomed, from time to time, to dip for the deeds done by them in the flesh--that is, in their corporeal, not their corporate capacity. Perhaps the law, in countenancing this arrangement, considered that the members of a corporation must be so essentially wound up in its interests, that parting with the money of the corporation--that is, with the money of the public--was as great a punishment for their own individual delicts as parting with their own. Be this as it may, the Court decreed that, on this occasion, the public of Aberdeen should not pay for the outrage inflicted on Williamson. Now let us behold the ingenuity with which these worshipful gentlemen baffled the Court, and made the public pay after all. There were certain dues collected by the magistrates, as deputies of the Lord High Admiral of the Coast. It appears that this high official might have applied the sums so levied to his own use, but he had ceased for some considerable time to exact them, and, by consuetude, they had been added to the revenues of the corporation. Now, if the Lord High Admiral had set covetous eyes on this fund, to apply it to his own domestic purposes, the act might have been considered one of unutterable meanness--perhaps the corporation would have resisted it. But, on the other hand, to demand a portion of this money, and use it for getting the members of the corporation out of a scrape, was a highly public-spirited act. The High Admiral assigned £180 from this fund, to pay the damages and costs to Williamson:[21] it need not be said, that of course this application was suggested to him by persons who had the best reason to believe that the corporation would not resist it, and that all the business arrangements for his operation on the fund were simplified to his hand.

[21] Kennedy's _Annals of Aberdeen_, i. 296.

Having been so far successful, Williamson, who seems to have had an insuperable objection to half-measures, raised an action of damages against his kidnappers. It has been asserted, though we do not know on what authority, that the Crown was desirous to institute criminal proceedings against them, but that they were protected by a clause of indemnity in some act of parliament. Williamson boldly laid his damages at £1000. His perseverance drove his adversaries to a series of extraordinary, and in this country, fortunately, unprecedented measures. They persuaded Williamson that it would be for the mutual advantage of the parties to have the matter settled by arbitration, without the costly intervention of the Court of Session. He adopted the advice, and the decision fell to be given by James Forbes of Shiels, Sheriff-Substitute of Aberdeenshire, acting as oversman. We are introduced to this gentleman's convivial character in a most startling manner, by the statement of counsel that the Sheriff's mother, Lady Shiels, "died about the 4th of November, and there can be no doubt that he would get a hearty dose at her burial." It was accordingly on that occasion that the worthy judge appears to have commenced a series of potations, under the pressure of which he speedily followed his parent to the grave. Williamson's affair came through his hands in the very climax of his convivial fit; and both parties seem to have considered it their duty to minister assiduously to these furious cravings, which ever cried with the Cyclop "Δος μοι ἑτι προφρων."

Williamson was not backward in contributing to the Sheriff's conviviality. His own account of his motives was, that knowing Forbes to be prepared to decide unfairly, he wished to keep him so hard at his beloved pursuit of drinking, that he should have no opportunity of exercising his other avocation of judging. Accordingly, he employed a friend "to tenchel and drink" the Sheriff--or, as it is elsewhere expressed, "to drink him hard;" in fact, the operation is talked of quite in an abbreviated and technical form, as a common proceeding in the way of business in the Sheriff Court. The drouthy crony who performed this duty seems to have taken to it with the same disinterested zeal, with which Kean sat up three nights drinking with a friend under depression, for the purpose of keeping up his spirits. The favoured individual must have felt his task coming light to his hands, when he found the Sheriff in a tavern "busy at hot punch about eleven o'clock forenoon." An attempt was made on him by the enemy, but Williamson and his drinking assistant carried him off in triumph to the "New Inn" to dinner, where, however, they were obliged to submit to the presence of the other party, who held a hospitable competition with them in plying the Sheriff with the liquor which he loved. Here they all "sat close drinking, as is the phrase in that part of the country, _helter skelter_--that is, copiously and alternately of different liquors--till 11 o'clock at night, when Forbes, by this time dead-drunk, was conveyed home by his two servant maids, with the assistance of George Williamson, Gerard, and the Pursuer." This is the counsel's history of the day, and that it is not an exaggerated one, we may infer from an average quotation from the evidence: one of the witnesses thus concludes his narrative:--

"Depones, that from four o'clock in the afternoon to eleven o'clock that night, they all drunk what they call in Aberdeenshire _Helter Skelter_, alternately of different liquors, and plentifully, in such a way that the Sheriff in particular was very drunk, and the deponent himself was also drunk. That the Sheriff's two servant maids came for him with a lantern to carry him home, and came into the room where the company was, and staid there some time--fully a quarter of an hour--and got some drink, but what it was he cannot tell. That the Sheriff called for a good part of the liquor which was drunk. That at last the deponent assisted to carry home the Sheriff, who was not able to walk; and either the pursuer or Mr Gerard assisted the deponent in so doing; and the two maids went before him with a lantern, and placed him in his easy-chair in his bedroom, and then the Sheriff called upon his maids to give the company drink, which the maids refused to give, and then they came away and left him."

Next day the enemy took possession of Forbes by a _coup de main_. They seized him in bed, half through his drunken sleep, and conveyed him to a favourite houf, kept by a man with the historical name of Archibald Campbell. There "tea and coffee were called for to breakfast, but as these insipid liquors were not to Forbes's mind, a large dose of spirits, white wine, and punch was administered to him, with cooling draughts of porter from time to time." The kidnappers hired a whole floor of the inn for that eventful day--it was the last on which the reference remained valid, so that if it passed without a decision, the question went back to the Court of Session; and the worthy confederates gave express instructions that Williamson was not to obtain access to their conclave, and that Forbes was to be denied to him. That sport of fortune became naturally alarmed when he heard that Forbes was not at home; and knowing instinctively where else he was likely to be, searched for him "in all the taverns in town," as Seldon tells us that the King of Spain was searched for in London when he was outlawed. One of the waiters, in his evidence, stated that Williamson came to the house and "inquired at the deponent if Shiels was there, to which he answered, in obedience to the orders he had received from collector Finlayson, that Shiels was _not_ there; that on this the pursuer left Mr Campbell's house, and (having returned in about an hour) he insisted with the deponent that Shiels was in the house, and that it was to no purpose to deny him, for that he knew by the deponent's face that he was there. But deponent still denied that Shiels was in the house." Deponent was, unfortunately for his professional prospects, not sufficiently brazen-faced for a waiter. The Sheriff was soon brought "up to the mark." Cards were introduced, and they had a roaring day of it. For the sake of appearances, at the time when he was making up his judicial mind, the Sheriff retired to a room alone. Here a message was conveyed to him from his sister, intimating that he had made an appointment for that day, and the time to keep it had arrived. "Whereupon," says a witness, "Shiels touched his nose with his finger, and said 'Jode'--a by-word of his--'Davie, you see from whence this comes'--that Shiels returned for answer to his servant that he could not go, being engaged about peremptory business." He first spoke about awarding "a trifle" to Williamson. In the end he gave a decision entirely against his claim; and the confederates considered this so great a triumph, that next morning, being Sunday, they were reported to have read the "Decree Arbitral" to a circle of impatient well-wishers on the "Plainstones" or market-place, while the citizens were on their way to church. After having pronounced the decree, the Sheriff, according to the testimony of one witness, "was very merry and jocose, and engrossed a good deal of the conversation;" and the waiter who refused Williamson admission to him had to testify that "he conveyed him home to his own house, as he had done many a night besides that."

There were many picturesque little incidents in the whole affair. Thus we are told by one witness, in a very pathetic strain, of abortive efforts made by the Sheriff to go through the public market-place from one tavern to another. "In a little the Sheriff and the deponent came down to go to the New Inn; and upon the Sheriff's observing that there were too many people upon the exchange, and that he was too far gone in liquor to cross the street, he turned in again to John Bain's, and afterwards made another attempt of the same kind, and returned for the same reason; and a little after two o'clock they made a third attempt, and, observing that the exchange was thin of people, they went over to the New Inn." Discreet Sheriff--he had achieved the Greek sage's problem of knowing himself! But other people knew him, too; and thus the hostess of the inn, being asked if "when Shiels was once drunk, he did not keep in a hand--that is, he continued drunk for some days," answered, that "she has observed Shiels as in drink at one time and to continue so for several days after, and that was too commonly his case; that it is her opinion, when Shiels was in liquor, by flattering of his vanity, he might be very easily induced to do things which he would not otherwise do; and the deponent has had occasion to see several instances of this sort, by which she means that she has heard Shiels, when in liquor, promise to do things which she believes he would not have done if sober; nor does the deponent remember or know that ever Shiels did do any of these things when sober that he said he would do when in liquor."

But there are two sides to all questions; and as human nature has a tendency towards extremes, there were some people prepared to testify to the supernatural and alarming intenseness of the Sheriff's sobriety. It was, we believe, a townsman of this same Sheriff who, when thrown from his horse, being asked by a sympathising lady who was passing, if he were hurt? answered in the intenseness of his politeness--"Oh! no, mem! quite the reverse--_quite_ the _reverse_." So it appeared in the eyes of some of his friends that Forbes was not merely as sober as a judge, but upon the whole a good deal more sober than a well-constituted judge ought to be--if he had any blemish, it was on the reverse side of intoxication. One of the several landladies whose establishments he frequented--not the lady already quoted--was especially eloquent on this point. "At dinner-time they only drank a bottle of wine and half a mutchkin of punch [the witness makes no allusion to the consumption before and after.] Mr Forbes also drank tea in the deponent's house, and she had occasion to see Mr Forbes at breakfast and dinner, and when he went out of her house when the company parted after supper at night; and upon all these occasions he, Mr Forbes, was perfectly sober, and sufficiently capable of business, and when he went out of her house, she remembers perfectly, she turned in to her servants and said, that she never knew Mr Forbes sit so long in her house on so little drink; and she added, God grant that neither Mr Forbes nor she might be fey." So awful and portentous was his sobriety! Another witness who testified to the production of so many items of liquor that it makes one giddy to read the list, winds up by saying--"After drinking a few glasses, they were told that supper was on the table in another room, to which they moved: That after supper they drank a moderate quantity of wine, and punch, and parted sober about eleven o'clock: That the deponent had a particular proof of Mr Forbes's sobriety after supper, by his maintaining, with great spirit and elocution, one side of a problematical question that occurred in the company."

The law is extremely averse to review the decision of an arbiter. He may be stupid and careless; he may have utterly misunderstood both the law and the facts; but the parties have adopted the reference as a _succedaneum_ to litigation, and they "must stand the hazard of the die." In a few instances, however, where there has been gross corruption, or a palpable combination against one of the parties, the law has interfered to reverse the proceedings. The case of Peter Williamson is one of these instances; and on the 3d of December 1768, some years after the poor Sheriff-Substitute had bidden himself from his disgrace by drinking himself into the grave, the Court awarded Peter Williamson damages to the extent of £200 against the persons who, nearly thirty years previously, had spirited him away from the pier of Aberdeen.

The subsequent career of Peter Williamson, though not all directly our present purpose, is so inviting that we cannot pass it over. He was one of those men who, with no settled purpose of life, have their brains perpetually spinning forth projects, and their hands perpetually putting them in operation. Wherever external circumstances placed him, there his internal nature predestined him turn the opportunities afforded him to the best account. We have seen him exercising the isolated energies of the self-sustaining savage in the wilderness; we shall now see him regulating the complex wheels of mutually dependent civilisation. One of his earliest projects was announced, in 1762, through a letter in the _Edinburgh Courant_. The drain of able-bodied men by the war had, he stated, prompted him to endeavour to discover some labour-saving machine, to facilitate the operations of the harvest; and he had at considerable expense invented an engine which would, "in the hands of a single man, do more execution in a field of oats in one day, and to better purpose, than it is in the power of six shearers to do. This machine," he continues, "is now completed, and is constructed in such a manner that, when the corn is tolerably thick, it will cut down near a sheaf at a stroke, and that without shaking the grain, or disordering the straw, besides laying down the corn as regularly as the most expert shearer can do." The machine possessed other qualifications far too numerous to be recapitulated here; and though the inventor protested that "neither vanity nor conceit," but the sole desire to serve the public, prompted him to expatiate on its merits, it is not absolutely necessary, at the present day, to join in all his anticipations of its wonderful influence on the amelioration of mankind. We are no authority on the abstruse practical subject of reaping-machines; but justice to our hero renders it right to say that his invention found a place in agricultural nomenclature, as "the basket-scythe."[22] We have already mentioned some of his achievements in literature. He published a pamphlet on the Militia: and, contemporaneously with the invention of the scythe, we find him advertising, along with his account of his adventures, that "Commissions from the country will be punctually answered for this and all other sorts of books; as also stationery-ware of all sorts;" and in connexion with this general announcement of a stationery-establishment, he enlarges on another book, apparently of his own composition, called "A General View of the Whole World; containing the Names of the principal Countries, Kingdoms, States, and Islands,--their length, breadth, and capital cities, with the longitude and latitude; also the produce, revenue, strength, and religion of each country." This encyclopedia, political, statistical, and theological, was to be had for six shillings sterling. From such comprehensive themes we find him descending to the object of the following curious advertisement, dated 9th April 1772:--

"This day was published, price one shilling the pack, and sold by Peter Williamson, printer, in the head of Forester's Wynd, Edinburgh, the IMPENETRABLE SECRETS which is called PROVERB-CARDS, containing excellent sentiment, and are so composed, that they discover the thoughts of one's mind in a very curious and extraordinary manner. The explanation of the secret is given gratis with the pack; each set consists of twenty cards, and ten lines upon each card."[23]

[22] A representation of it will be found in the _Scots Magazine_ for 1762, p. 404.

[23] This advertisement, with other curious newspaper-scraps regarding Williamson, is preserved in the biographical notices of Kay's Portraits, i. 137.

We may here, perhaps, have traced to its invention the well-known toy called "Conversation-Cards," which has enlivened many a little Christmas party. If this be so, the debt of youth in general, to the poor kidnapped boy, is not small.

In 1776 he started a weekly periodical called "The Scot's Spy, or Critical Observer," which appears to have been continued through the following year with the title of "The New Scot's Spy." In the mean time, he kept a tavern, over the door of which he advertised himself as "from the other world." It appears to have been for some time in the Parliament Square, and subsequently in the interior of the Parliament House itself, part of the wide area of which was partitioned into booths. Every now and then he was dropping before the public some invention great or small. Now it was a "new invented portable printing-press;" next, marking-ink for linen, "which stands washing, boiling, and bleaching, and is more regular and beautiful than any needle." But the chief monument of his energy was the establishment of a penny post-office for the city of Edinburgh, which he supported as a private speculation. It appears to have been soon after the year 1780 that he commenced this undertaking, and contemporaneously with it he published a Street Directory. One might suppose that the post-office, the directory, and the tavern, with an occasional invention or pamphlet, would form sufficient occupation, not only for one head, but one family. Williamson, however, must have _all_ his fires full of irons; and so we find that his wife and daughter had to appear before the public as busy as himself in their own department. On the cover of his directory it is intimated, that "Mantua-making is carried on in all its branches as formerly," by "Mrs Williamson and daughter;" who, lest any means of exercising their craft should pass them, by reason either of its insignificance or its gravity, are made to state, that they "engraft silk, cotton, thread, and worsted stockings; make silk gloves, and every article in the engrafting branch, in the neatest manner, and on the most reasonable terms; likewise silk stockings washed in the most approved style; also grave-clothes made on the shortest notice."

One would naturally imagine that all these professions of activity must have indicated a thrifty, industrious, moral, happy home. Alas, no! In 1789 Williamson was obliged to divorce his second wife, the mother of several children; and the revolting details of the inquiry show too plainly that the degraded woman pursued another profession besides those efforts of decent industry which her husband advertised to the world. She, on her part, charged her husband with having acquired tipling habits, and keeping low dissipated company; while she stated that, notwithstanding the considerable sums that passed through his hands in the course of his various speculations, his family were frequently subjected to great privations. The inquiries connected with the divorce exhibit throughout, tokens of sordid squalor, which show that Williamson was little fitted to seize the tides of fortune that so frequently ran in his favour, or to direct his energies into any satisfactory path of self-advancement. Active and turbulent as he had been--dreaded, admired, nay, respected for his services as a citizen--he had never bettered his condition, or risen above the rank of the vagabond. His total want of early education may have unfitted him to take advantage of his opportunities. "The reader," he says, in one of his pamphlets, "will be here asking what school I was brought up at? I shall only tell them, that the extent of it was upwards of four thousand miles, and the height thereof as high as the heavens, governed by Indians of many nations; and regular education is no way taught among them, but handed down from one generation to another; and their records are kept, marked with tomahawks on the outside of trees, and can be distinguished by themselves for centuries back." It might be a sublime school--but not a hopeful seminary for sober citizens. Yet, among Kay's exquisitely hard etchings there is a portrait of Peter, from which it is evident that lie must have been a very handsome worshipful-looking man, with that well-fed self-assured air--that corporation dignity of manner, and citizen urbanity, if one may use the expression, which beseem the corporate officer. Nature and the tailor seem at the moment to have united to represent in his person a Deacon at least, if not a Bailie. He is depicted in conversation with Abyssinian Bruce, and as saying to the haughty Lord of Kinnaird--"There is more truth in one page of my Edinburgh directory, than in all your five volumes 4to; so, when you talk to me, don't imagine yourself at the source of the Nile." Poor Williamson's eventful life came to an end on the 19th January 1769.

THE REPEALER'S WISH GRANTED.[24]--AN IRISH TALE.

IN ONE SHORT CHAPTER.

[24] As this paper was being printed, we were struck with the coincidence between the general idea contained in it and two striking articles in the _Times_ newspaper. We know that the writer of the present article had not, when he wrote it, seen the articles in the _Times_. But these views, in our opinion, cannot be too often impressed on the attention of the reflecting portion of the Irish people.

Nobody doubts that there was hot blood--misunderstanding--difficulty-- at the beginning. It is clear enough, also, that many arrangements which followed were not of a soothing kind. Nor can it well be denied;--but stop a little! The other side of the question seems to be perpetually consigned to oblivion. Numbers of people are in ecstasies with the year 1782. The wildest democrats of the present day revert with pride to the glimpse of nationality exhibited by Ireland immediately before the Union. The grand choral cry of Repealers is for a Parliament _once more_ in Dublin. Oh, melancholy, deplorable, almost ludicrous inconsistency! The year 1782 and Repeal! The independence of Ireland after 1782 and Repeal! The old Irish Parliament and Repeal! Plunket--a son of Ireland--talked of history being an old almanac. Memorable indeed was the year 1782. BUT ITS TROPHIES WERE, THE HANDIWORK OF THE SAXON. Bright may have been the gleam of independence which succeeded that year. The whole movement owed character and solidity to GREAT SAXON LEADERS. Conspicuous is the fame of those men who protested with fiery eloquence against the treaty of the Union; and THESE WERE ALL SAXONS. It is very strange, but very true, that the sinews and loins of the agitation now-a-days are all begotten of Saxon spirit and Saxon freedom. There is not a letter in the alphabet of self-government--there is not a syllable in the code of municipal law--there is not a sentence in the charter of political liberty--of Ireland, which is not the lesson, the example, or the boon of the Saxon. Every thing that Ireland now demands is an imitation of a Saxon institution. And Ireland only demands these things, because for ages Saxon institution have pervaded her soil, and imbued her people. GRATTAN and CHARLEMONT are Saxon names. In all the principles for which these remarkable men contended, no vestige of a Celtic idea can be traced. Until the Saxon--conqueror as he was--touched the Irish soil, there did not grow, blossom, or bear fruit any intelligible notion of social order, or public liberty. But the gratitude of nations is not different from the gratitude of individuals. Away with the Saxon!

Can nothing cure the madness? Large practical wisdom in legislation, exuberant boundless prodigality of munificence, are equally unavailing. Away with the Saxon! But disgust may at length do what force never could have done. Honest, sober, orderly folks in Britain begin to cherish strange thoughts. And the wings of thoughts are words outspoken.

Are ye ready, O Milesians! for such a dawn when it breaks?

* * * * *

There was nothing either very bright or very dull about the morning. Yet not a single human being you met was inclined even to whistle merrily or recklessly. And was there, then, silence over the whole land? Very far from it, I assure you. At the harbour of every sea-port, where a vessel of any size could come, there was a most unmistakeable noise. Heavily, steadily, dreadfully, came down along the rugged stones of each quay the continual tread and tramp of armed men, who, coldly and speechlessly as statues, marched towards the ships. But there was no other noise. The officers gave no word of command; nor was any command needed. Unbroken as the stream of the river, hundreds after hundreds, without any clash, or din, or tumult, passed from the solid land on board of the floating bulwarks of Old England, and without a shout or a sigh--without a murmur of adieu--without the momentary radiance of a smile on a solitary face--departed FROM IRELAND. The Saxons were going. The quick strokes of the paddle-wheels whitened the waters;--the sail bellied bigly to the wind. From ERIN the GREEN, the Saxons were GONE. Then rose from earth to sky--what?

For many a day thousands of eyes had been gazing at the bustling scene. At first, the spectacle of such crowds of all sorts of people going leisurely away with all their kith and kin, with all their bag and baggage, brought with it no distinct idea. The first loaded ship which left the harbour with such a freight took its departure beneath a shower of triumphantly derisive shouts. And so did many a vessel afterwards. But people become tired of shouting at the same thing. Likewise, a constant repetition of the same thing, which in certain circumstances will destroy wonder, does in other circumstances beget and spread wonder. The sameness of the business began to be painful. Countless throngs of lookers-on still choked the quay: but the gibe was rarely heard; the cheer had quite died away. It was incredible how time lagged in its flight. Suddenly, once more, a stir ran through these gazing tens of thousands. A feeble cry--more like a cry of pain than of joy--rang from the discord of the innumerable lips. Every body was gone, except the soldiers. Of the hated Saxons, all who lived by the arts or occupations of peace, all were at length away--men, women, and children. The soldiers remained till all their peaceful brethren were safely on the bosom of the treacherous sea--safer than the bosom of ungrateful Ireland. The soldiers now went themselves. It was not an hour or a day, in which that embarkation could be completed. On it went without interruption. And the people stood by, and saw it going on. Why was there not the continuous roar of exultation from moment to moment, as file after file, regiment after regiment, mass after mass of the bloody servants of the Saxon sullenly and silently retreated? Strange, surely, that it was not so! Strange, surely, that there was no whisper all this time from the bystanders! Strange, surely, that the bystanders, as the ships, ship after ship, sailed away with those very Saxon soldiers, began to turn their regards off altogether from the ships, and to fling unquiet doubtful glances one on the other! The detested foreigner was gone;--and was there, therefore, more neighbourly love among those that remained?

What! Erin Mavourneen, is not your emancipation come? Why is there no shout? The Saxons are going. The quick strokes of the paddle-wheels whiten the waters. Where is the pæan of the ransomed and redeemed? The sail bellies bigly to the wind. From Erin the Green, the Saxons are gone. Then rose from earth to sky--what?

IRELAND IS LEFT TO ITSELF--WHOLLY, ENTIRELY, ABSOLUTELY TO ITSELF. The Repealer has his wish. The sea runs between Ireland and England--and all that is Irish and all that is English. The cable is cut. The Emerald Isle is adrift. No Saxon soldier pollutes her soil; but not a Saxon shilling glistens in her purse. The British Viceroy is no more; neither is the British Chancellor of the Exchequer any more--THERE. Ireland has got its own parliament. ALSO IRELAND HAS GOT ITS OWN POOR. Not a stiver of English millions now crosses St George's Channel. Not for one death by starvation now is England or the Saxon answerable. IRELAND HAS HER OWN EXUBERANT EXCHEQUER. IRELAND POURS ABUNDANCE INTO THE MYRIAD MOUTHS OF HER FAMINE-STRICKEN PEOPLE. Shout, then, O Ireland! shout!

The sail bellies bigly to the wind. From Erin the Green the Saxons are gone. The sun of Repeal is at its noon. Then rose from earth to sky--what?

And they looked into the faces of each other with a dull, blank look--and from earth to sky arose the yell of wild despair, of irretrievable confusion, and of maddening perdition.

The Repealer had his wish. The cable was cut. Ireland was adrift--and LEFT TO ITSELF. Order, law, justice, peace, trade, industry, money, prosperity, and--oh terrible truth!--INDEPENDENCE were gone away--quite away with the SAXON.

* * * * *

And the Milesian Republic endured--we blush to number the hours of its ephemeral and horrible existence. Every where the fair face of the beautiful ISLE was hideously seamed with scars of civil war. Every where mounted upwards the smoke of roof-trees destroyed, and hearthstones desolated. Every where over the surface of the great surrounding ocean boomed the discordant wail of the land torn by the vultures of anarchy.

Again! at the harbours of sea-ports there was an unmistakeable noise. Over the rugged stones went the continual tramp and tread of armed men, who, with bursts of brutal insolence, marched from the ships. The clang of foreign arms again sounded in the cities, along the plains, and across the hills of Erin. Ireland had become the province of a foreign power which did not speak the English tongue. Ireland was that day trampled on by the iron heel of a new master.

Albion, from its white cliffs, saw the scene. But the ties had been long broken.

THE LAST WALK.

BY B. SIMMONS.

Oh lost Madonna, young and fair! O'er-leant by broad embracing trees, A streamlet to the lonely air Murmurs its meek low melodies; And there, as if to drink the tune, And mid the sparkling sands to play, One constant Sunbeam still at noon Shoots through the shades its golden way.

My lost Madonna, whose glad life Was like, that ray of radiant air, The March-wind's violet scents blew rife When last we sought that fountain fair. Blythe as the beam from heaven arriving, --Thy hair held back by hands whose gleam Was white as stars with night-clouds striving-- Thy bright lips bent and sipp'd the stream.

Fair fawn-like creature! innocent In soul as faultless in thy form,-- As o'er the wave thy beauty bent It blushed thee back each rosy charm. How soon the senseless wave resign'd The tints, with thy retiring face, While glass'd within my mournful mind Still glows that scene's enchanting grace.

Ah! _every_ scene, or bright or bleak, Where once thy presence round me shone, To echoing Memory long shall speak The Past's sweet legends, Worshipp'd One! The wild blue hills, the boundless moor, That, like my lot, stretch'd dark afar, And o'er its edge, thine emblem pure, The never-failing evening star.

The lawn on which the Sunset's track Crimson'd thy home beside the Glen-- The village pathway, leading back From thee to haunts of hated men-- The walk to watch thy chamber's ray, 'Mid storm and midnight's rushing wings-- These, these were joys, long pass'd away, To dwell with Grief's eternal things.

My lost Madonna, fair and young! Before thy slender-sandall'd feet The dallying wave its silver flung, Then dash'd far ocean's breast to meet; And farther, wider, from thy side Than unreturning streams could rove, Dark Fate decreed me to divide-- _To me_, my henceforth buried Love!

Yes! far for ever from thy side, Madonna, now for ever fair, To death of DISTANCE I have died, And all has perished, but--Despair. Whether thy fate with woe be fraught, Or Joy's gay rainbow gleams o'er thee, I've died to all, but the mad thought That WHAT WAS ONCE NO MORE SHALL BE.

'Tis well:--at least I shall not know How time or tears may change that brow; Thine eyes shall smile, thy cheek shall glow To me in distant years as now. And when in holier worlds, where Blame, And Blight, and Sorrow, have no birth, Thou'rt mine at last--I'll clasp the same Unalter'd Angel, loved on earth.

MAN IS A FEATHERLESS BIPED.

I have heard--I saw yesterday that fact enlarged upon in Mrs Thunder's _Tales of Passion_--that people's hair may be turned gray by intense anxiety, intense fear, intensity of any kind, in a single day. My hair is not exactly gray (far from it, indeed, considering my time of life)--but, if the above physical phenomenon did ever really occur, it ought to be silvery-white. For I have passed through a day, the consequences of which colour, and will colour, my whole existence. Life's fever came to a crisis, and the crisis turned out unfavourably. The threads of my destiny got into a tangle, and Fate in a passion cut the knot with her scissors. My earthly career has been divided into two distinctly-marked portions, and the point where the two are united--the bending-stone (as the Greeks say) of the race-course, is the day on which I was _plucked_.

Reader of Maga, as your experiences are possibly confined to the land of Maga's nativity, I will explain to you what it is to be plucked. It is to have your degree refused at one of the English universities. Now don't suppose that, when I have said this, I have said all. The mischief does not end with the refusal. It is bad enough, truly, to have gone through three years of reading and walking, or of port-wine drinking and tandem-driving, and then to get nothing for your trouble. But that's not it. A plucking brings with it consequences quite peculiar to itself--consequences hardly intelligible out of England--hardly intelligible, indeed, out of the sphere of the upper classes in England. The English universities are the nurseries of adolescent English gentlemen--of the whole aristocracy, church, and bar. And the many thousand persons comprised in these very extensive denominations, although they may have nothing else in common, agree in fond and not very discriminating reverence for Oxford and Cambridge. I really believe that many a man, whose actual reminiscences of these seats of learning are confined to the pace of the boats and the badness and dearness of the wine, yet manages to persuade himself that his being was somehow exalted by his three years' course. And then the sacredness which attaches to their verdict! A fellow will pass current any where with the university stamp upon him. I _know_ that Muggleton, who got a medal, and is the slowest dummy in creation, used to be invited occasionally to dinner-parties as a substitute for the late S. S. Besides, university life is common ground to half the world. You place Tories and Whigs, high churchmen and low churchmen, round the same table, and there follows a wrangle or a quarrel; but, let the conversation once veer round to the incidents of "Slogger's year," or the character of Dr ----, and you will find the talk flowing freely, and opinions unanimous.

So you see the unpleasantness of there being nothing to be said about one, under such circumstances, except that one was _plucked_. Of Mr Pennefeather, of Elmstead Lodge, Surrey, (my present designation,) little is known in the neighbourhood of the aforesaid Elmstead Lodge, beyond the fact that he and his charming family live there. But the name of Pennefeather of St Saviour's, Cambridge, is common property, and hundreds know it in connexion with certain unfortunate circumstances, already alluded to.

I was always in my college considered rather a reading man. I attended chapel and lecture regularly. I went to few parties or none. Grindham of St John's (the present dean of ----), and Swetter of Trinity (the new Queen's counsel), backed by their respective colleges for the senior wranglership, were old school-fellows of mine, and we continued our acquaintance. By dint of flattering Swetter, and listening to Grindham's endless holdings forth on mathematical subjects, I grew into favour with both. I believe the worthy fellows began to think me one of themselves,--nothing very brilliant, perhaps, but still sure of a decent place in the honour-list. And, indeed, had fate pleased, their influence might have brought things to a better issue. I was induced to keep my outer door scrupulously shut till two o'clock P.M.; and, though I often fell asleep in my chair, and conic sections always made my head ache, I nevertheless made some way. But I was ruined by a flute! I had learned to play in early life--my mother liked me to accompany my sisters; and now the accomplishment, of which I had grown most school-boyishly ashamed, was discovered by a lazy, handsome, perfumed, kid-gloved _flaneur_ of a fellow, Jenkyns of our college, whose rooms were above mine. He was just then getting up a musical association, and of all things wanted a second flute. I have no patience to narrate the steps of the seduction and triumph,--how I resisted his overtures at first, then gave way conditionally, then unconditionally,--how we had meetings, and held committees, and gave concerts,--how the dons first looked suspicious, then indifferent, then applausible,--and how, finally, far conspicuous with my white waistcoat and baton, I led the band on the first anniversary of our foundation, in the presence of the vice-chancellor and a brilliant assemblage of professors and heads of houses. But the degree examination was approaching--unappeasable, inevitable.

Grindham, I confess, had begun to look cold on me; but Swetter, who was a little ambitious of being considered an accomplished gentleman as well as a great mathematician, rather countenanced my proceedings. He never joined us himself--he was a great deal too deep for that--but he largely affected contempt for fellows who maintained that fiddling and reading were incompatible. And indeed, without being in the least aware of it, I had been made, as it were, the pattern-man of our association and the new system. Did any one object to our concerts, rehearsals, and practisings, as occupying too much time, he was referred to Pennefeather of St Saviour's, "a regular leading man, by Jove--pal of Grindham and Swetter--goes home after a concert, and sits up half the night with a wet cloth round his head." So said report--lying as usual; and my fall was the greater in consequence.

The examination was over, and the result was to be announced next morning. I had felt my ideas rather vague on the subject of the questions asked, and half suspected that my answers partook of their looseness. Still I had my hopes--I had covered a good deal of paper with my writing--a wranglership was not so very unlikely. With this conviction I went to bed, and slept, on the whole, very soundly. In the morning I dressed, shaved, and breakfasted, with considerable deliberation; and, just before nine o'clock, walked down to the senate-house. The scene there, on this and like occasions, is sufficiently exciting to an uninterested person--something more than exciting to one in a situation like mine. A crowd of young men, half mad with expectation, beset the doors of the edifice. The fate of themselves and their friends, their bets and the honour of their respective colleges, are at stake. They shout and scream. The doors are thrown open. All rush in. A pandemoniac confusion ensues. Then some patriotic individual volunteers to read aloud the expanded list, and, hoisted on the shoulders of his neighbours, begins,--WRANGLERS, "Grindham, St John's; Swetter, Trinity; Pump, Trinity, ("Hooray!" shouts somebody, and runs off to convey the intelligence to Mr Pump, who is funking in his room)--Mullins, St John's; Shobley, St Saviours; &c., &c." I listened calmly to the first half of the wrangler-list, anxiously to the last, tremblingly to the names in the next class, agonisedly to those in the third and last. _My name was not there at all!_ In the hope that it might have been omitted by mistake, I waited until the crowd thinned, and then, with dim eyes, read the paper myself. There was no mistake at all. I ran, unobserved, to my rooms, locked myself in, and during the next three hours I won't say what I did or thought. There _are_ moments--but never mind! I'm a father of a family now.

The day was verging towards the afternoon when I put on my hat, determined to go out and brave the mocking looks of the undergraduate world. I thought I had some notion of what was to be expected, but the bitterness of the draught surpassed all my anticipations. I had hardly got outside the gate of my college, when there turned the nearest corner a walking party of fifteen gentlemen abreast--the centre-piece was Grindham. The two wings were composed of his admiring, flattering friends. My appearance caused a singular alteration in the countenances of the party. Some looked awkwardly; most of them manifested a strong inclination to laugh; but Grindham himself would have passed without recognising me, had not his neighbour whispered something in his ear. He turned and shook hands--I would have given the world so that he had cut me, for I expected some of that pity which "d----d goodnatured" friendship proffers on such occasions. Alas! my friend had forgotten _my_ position in his own: he did not seem in the least aware that any person except himself and Swetter, the defeated Swetter, had been interested in the late examination. He talked incoherently for some minutes, for repressed exultation was making his eyes dim, and causing his tongue to stutter; and there we stood, he the victor and I not even worthy to be considered the vanquished, chattering on the most indifferent matters--even about that confounded musical association--and neither of us venturing to touch upon the subject which was filling each of our hearts to overflowing. Had any one of the fourteen young men who were tittering together at a little distance, been a cynic or a psychologist, he might have freely fed his humour, or made a valuable addition to his stock of observation. Grindham, Pennefeather--pride struggling hard to be modest; shame striving to gloss itself over with gay indifference--human nature in either case denying and belying itself--what lesson, or what a caricature! But, just before we separated, something seemed to strike my companion. He suddenly became more confused than ever, and then was clearly striving hard to look sentimental. "By the bye, my dear fellow--oh! ah! I was very sorry ... better luck next time, eh!" And so we parted. But I had lost my friend.

I proceeded. An indistinct object became visible on the other side of the way, which, as I approached, gradually assumed the form and proportions of a man. It was a figure, not unfrequently seen in my day in the streets of Cambridge: a broad-brimmed, low-crowned hat, which completely concealed the countenance of the wearer, just permitted to loom out of its shadow a many-coloured neckhandkerchief, printed with the flags of all nations. This last cosmopolitan habiliment shone in advantageous contrast to a dogskin waistcoat, of indescribable hue, and immensely broad trousers of white flannel. No coat at all was visible in front, but behind you might perceive that one of bright olive-coloured cloth came sharply out immediately below the arms,--a sporting Newmarket coat, exaggerated to intensity. Such was the outer man of Mr Charles Maxey, of St Saviour's; the inner man was full of all corruption and wickedness. This gentleman, being rather at a loss for occupation amid the uncongenial excitements of the day, was engaged in somewhat roughly schooling a small and horribly ugly terrier puppy to follow him up and down the street. I had no acquaintance with him. I knew nothing of him whatever, beyond the fact that he generally entered the College Hall very much after the proper time, dressed in a rough pilot coat, and invariably swearing violently, as he came in, at some unknown person or object outside the door. But it appeared that, if I had lost one friend, I had gained another. He, who would never have ventured to speak to me before--for the credit of our college, let me say that he was completely and universally cut--now rushed across the street, and shaking me by the hand, bade me "cheer up, (I had flattered myself I was looking tolerably cheerful,) and d--n the concern!" The beast then favoured me with a dissertation on the nature, cause, and consequences of mishaps like mine; in the course of which he explained that his own two pluckings had been entirely owing to the remissness of his private tutor, in not providing cigars at his (the private tutor's) rooms, and thereby failing to render Mr Maxey's studies sufficiently agreeable. "B--and T--," censoriously remarked that gentleman, "always do it: so I shall go to one of them, and cut old Z--, next term." Finally, he insisted on taking me off to breakfast, (breakfast at two o'clock!) at the rooms of a friend of his, who had been plucked fifteen times, and meant going on to the twentieth plucking, to entitle himself (according to an old Cambridge tradition,) to a gratuitous degree. I accompanied him in passive helplessness, and found a room some thing more than filled with about thirty Maxeys, smoking and singing. I remember it all to this day;--the indescribable songs--the spiced ale--Maxey's story about trotting the gray mare to Newmarket--the jocular allusions to myself--all this comes over me now like a dream of purgatory. The events of that day are indissolubly linked together in my mind; and I can never recall my misfortune without recalling too the meeting with Grindham and the party at the rooms of Mr Maxey's friend. But hard as these things were to endure in our little world at Cambridge, I have since experienced worse consequences of that accursed plucking among grown men, and in a manner made more painful to a sensitive organisation like mine.

I won't say what my father said when he heard of this termination of my university career. He had been a chancellor's medallist himself, and, in virtue of his medal, was listened to in parliament before the war. I believe he thought that all a man's doings in life were contained in his university exploits, like the chicken in the egg. Me he sent off to read theology with a clergyman in the country, previously to taking orders--for a family living awaited me. In this position I remained two years. I may mention, in passing, that my worthy instructor, a perfect ninny, though a former fellow of his college, despised me utterly for my past failure, and was at no pains to conceal his contempt; and at the end of that time, I set out for the cathedral city of F----, to go through the bishop's preparatory examination. Now, there is a prevalent notion in England, or at least in the English universities, that a bishop's examination is regulated after a peculiar fashion. It is reported that the prelate, or his chaplain, examines beforehand the calendars of the two universities, and adapts his subsequent questions to the information thence derived, in what may be called reverse order. Thus, a wrangler or first-classman, being supposed fit for any thing, is asked nothing in particular. It was even whispered--ay! even in these days of priestly dignity--that when my friend Grindham's eldest son, himself a second senior wrangler, went up a few weeks ago to the Bishop of ----, his lordship merely demanded information respecting the feeling of the university on the Hampden question, and on being satisfactorily answered, remarked that he dined at six, and dismissed his examinee. But, to resume--the questions are said, or rather were said, to increase in difficulty with the decreasing honours of the applicant. A second-classman had questions of average difficulty put to him, a man who took no honours, was stiffly catechised; a plucked man--but how it fared, and perhaps still fares, with plucked men, you shall judge from my case. After a night of excessive nervousness at the inn, I proceeded to the palace at ten o'clock in the morning. A number of serious-looking, white-cravatted, young men were waiting in the outer room, into which I was ushered. It was bitterly cold: there was, it is true, a fire; but it was actually going out, because no one dared to stir the Episcopal embers. An inner door every now and then opened and shut, admitting each time some one individual of the shivering crowd into the dreaded presence. Many old familiar faces were there. I should perhaps have shrunk from their aspect, had not nervousness, and perhaps a feeling that every one of them might in a few minutes find himself in my identical position, placed us all on a level. So I looked almost boldly about me. After a few minutes, I was on the point of addressing an old acquaintance, when, above the shoulder of the man to whom I was about to speak, there appeared a face, often seen but always loathed in my walking and sleeping visions. It was Maxey's. The cosmopolitan handkerchief had disappeared, and the debauched eyes looked brighter and less bloodshot than of old; but it was the same Maxey who fraternised with me on the day of my fall. He was--I am sorry to say--attempting to get into orders. He had been rejected, he told me, once before, but he had now been "coached by so-and-so half a year, and meant to manage it this time." Whether Mr So-and-So provided cigars for theological pupils I did not inquire; I was too much sickened by Maxey's presence,--so much so that it was really a relief when I was summoned in my turn to the Bishop's apartment. I passed through a long passage, then through an ante-room; lastly, a door opened, and displayed his lordship sitting solemnly at a large green table. The chaplain was leaving the room just as my name was announced. I saw him put his hand to his mouth, and distinctly heard him whisper in a loud aside--"_Plucked in_ 18--, my Lord."

The Bishop's face assumed an expression of yet more awful solemnity. He gravely motioned me to sit down, and then, looking me full in the eyes, said--"Ah hem! I have no doubt, Mr Pennefather, you have sufficiently prepared yourself for the--hem--important office you propose to take on yourself. I am sorry to say that this--ah!--hem--most important office is often entered upon without sufficient--hem-- preparation."

A pause. Fluency was not his lordship's forte. But if the moral annihilation of the object addressed is the end and aim of oratory, he proved himself in this case a Demosthenes.

He then continued--"Nothing is more--hem--essential to a clergyman than a knowledge of the early history of Christianity. Let me ask you what you know of the Patripassian heresy?"

I don't know what I might have answered under other circumstances, but the chaplain's whisper and the Bishop's exordium were too much for me. I could not utter a word. Other questions followed, to which I answered nothing or nonsense. In the end I recollect that his lordship made me a long speech, from which I gathered--it was not difficult to do this, as it consisted of the same sentence repeated in every variety of collocation--that he was very sorry that he could not admit me into orders with such--hem--ah--insufficient preparation.

I bowed and left the room, passed through the ante-chamber and passage into the apartment where the rest of the candidates were waiting, and thence made my exit with some words of Mr Maxey's dancing and humming in my ears,--"_so we're plucked again, old boy!_"

Between this scene and the next passage of my life, which I shall sketch or the reader's benefit, there was an interval of several years. I had been abroad most of the time, and had very nearly managed to forget my university misfortune. There was no occasion to revert to the bishop, for my elder brother died, and I stepped into his place--the family living being duly put out to nurse for my brother Tom. From the proximate parson, I had become the bachelor heir, with rooms in Piccadilly, a groom, and a brougham.

One day--it was in the course of my first season in town--I was dining with Jobson in Hamilton Place. Why I went so frequently to Jobson's, any body who remembers Emily Jobson, and what an angel she looked in that lilac silk, will easily guess. I had flattered myself I was not prospering badly with her. But I knew there was a rival in the field--no other person than my old friend Swetter, then a rising junior of five-and-thirty at the chancery bar. We were running on a _tie_, as I fancied--Swetter and I. The dear girl was, I am sure, very much puzzled to decide between us; and I often thought I could see, by the expression of her face, that she was balancing Swetter, his advantages and disadvantages, his possible peerage, and the necessity entailed on his wife of staying in London through the winter, against me and my little place in Surrey. And all the time, I had an uneasy consciousness that my rival could get the start, if he pleased, by confiding to Emily certain awkward antecedents of mine, known to the reader. But, to do him justice, he was too much of a gentleman to head me by such means. This I knew, and though at this very dinner-party he was sitting opposite Emily and myself, and looking exquisitely uncomfortable every time I whispered in her ear between the spoonfuls of _bisque d'écrivisses_, I felt certain that even greater provocation would not tempt him to peach. So all went smoothly--as smoothly as things ought to go at one of Jobson's admirable dinners. But towards the middle of the second course, Jobson's voice, which had been growing gradually louder since we sat down, became so overpowering as to beat down and absorb all other conversation. He was talking about Cambridge and his son Plantagenet. Jobson is a _nouveau riche_ (some of his friends call him Tyburn Jobson, because he made his money in hemp), and rather unnecessarily fond of introducing the now well-known facts that Plantagenet is at the university, and Tudor in the Guards. So, Jobson giving the cue, Cambridge became the text of the general conversation. Glauber, who stammers horridly, and, like most stammering men, takes every opportunity of telling long and inextricable stories, began to hold forth, in the midst of general silence, concerning Lady Ligham's son William, whom her ladyship would persist in believing a genius, and whom she had sent to Cambridge expressly to be senior wrangler. "But," added Glauber, "only the other d..d..d..day I heard he was p..p..p..pluck--."

The word was not out of his mouth, when that brute Jones, who was next him, gave him a tremendous admonitory poke in the side. Glauber first turned wrathfully on him, and then, beginning to comprehend, looked straight at me--his red face becoming redder with confusion, and his great goggle eyes almost starting out of his head.

"I b . . b . . b . . beg your p . . p . ." begun the wretch; but Swetter and Jones, who had been writhing with suppressed laughter, here gave vent to such sounds as effectually drowned his miserable voice. I gulped down a glass of champagne, and made things worse by choking myself. Meanwhile Emily looked on with a face of the utmost astonishment.

Well, we concluded dinner, drank Jobson's wine, and ascended to the drawing-room. No sooner did we enter, than I saw Emily go straight up to Swetter, and ask a question. He laughed a good deal at first, and then visibly commenced a long story. I followed it in Emily's face as clearly as if I had been listening to it. Yes! the temptation was too much for Swetter; and, to say the truth, he only did what any one else would have done in like circumstances. He told all. Determined to know my fate, I walked to Emily's chair, and began conversing in my usual strain. She was civil--just civil--but in less than five minutes, she managed to inform me that she hoped her dear brother Plantagenet would work hard at Cambridge--_for the honour of his family_. It was enough. Swetter and she were married in two months.

I left London without waiting for the season to conclude, and buried myself and a fishing-rod in a lonely Welsh cottage. For months I saw nobody but the old woman whom I brought from Monmouth to cook my dinners. She, I believe, thought me decidedly mad--principally because I once swore dreadfully at her, when, _àpropos_ of a chicken on which I was to dine, she used a word vernacularly employed to signify the stripping birds of their feathers. I fished, caught nothing, and mused on Emily. At last, however, on casually extending a ramble to a greater length than usual, I found that a house, five miles from my present residence, and quite as solitary, had been taken by an English family. As a matter of course--though I really cannot precisely remember in what way--we became acquainted. All I know is, that I determined the acquaintance should commence as soon as possible, immediately after meeting a young lady in a pink bonnet, who was sauntering along the side of the stream in which I was pretending to fish. This was Caroline Lumley. They were the Lumleys--Captain and Mrs Lumley, and two daughters. The family had lived the anomalous life common to English semi-genteel families with small incomes. They had resided, now in Jersey, now in Dublin, now on the Continent--every where but in civilised and inhabitable parts of England. At present they had settled themselves down, for the sake of cheapness, in a spot where every thing except mutton and house-rent was twice as expensive as in London, and where they had to walk five miles to meet with a neighbour.

That neighbour was myself. I was sick with disappointed love, and Caroline Lumley was dying with ennui. Need I say that in six weeks we were engaged!

I really believe that she worshipped me as a superior being. There had been few or no men in the out-of-the-way places where they had lived. There never are. They are all draughted off to business and employments of various kinds. So I not only had no equal in her estimation, but could not, by any possibility, have had one. She thought me the handsomest man in the world. She used to praise my talents and accomplishments to my face. Indeed, by the side of old Captain Lumley, who, prosy by nature, had long ago exhausted all his topics, I might have appeared a Crichton. Every now and then, however, when Caroline had called me clever, there used to come over me a shudder. Could _she_ be ever brought to think of me as Emily Jobson probably did? The idea was positively maddening. Many a night did I lie awake, speculating whether, after all, it might not be better to secure myself against another such cross of destiny by freely revealing to her my great secret.

At last, reflection, building on the reminiscences of an old Cambridge tradition, suggested to me a plan which I lost no time in executing.

"My love," said I to Caroline one morning, "did you ever hear of Cambridge?"

"Oh yes!" she replied, apparently quoting from Pinnock; "it's the capital of Cambridgeshire."

"Did you never hear any thing else about it?" rejoined I.

"It's famous for its university, isn't it?" said she, seemingly from the same source.

"On this hint I spake," and told her how that I had been educated at Cambridge, and how that, after three years of intense study, I had received the greatest honour the university had to bestow--_a plucking_.

"Yes," said I, my face radiant with a triumphant expression--"I was actually plucked."

"I am sure you were, you dear, clever thing!" cried she, throwing her arms round my neck.

We were married at Monmouth, and I took my bride straight to London. I own I was a little desirous of showing Emily Jobson, or rather Emily Swetter, that there was a young lady in the world quite as pretty as herself, and with better taste. Swetter and his wife called on us as soon as he heard we were in town; and shortly afterwards we dined with them at their new house in Torrington Square. Among the guests was Grindham--_my_ Grindham, but how changed! He had become tutor of his college, and had expanded into the most perfect specimen of the university don I ever beheld. He was positively swelling with importance. So inordinately conspicuous, indeed, was his air of self-appreciation, that even my little Caroline noticed it; and I heard her ask Mrs Swetter who and what he was.

"He took the very highest honours at Cambridge," said she in reply.

Caroline smiled, and seemed to think him quite justified in looking as important as he did.

The cloth was removed. Caroline was sitting by Grindham's side. She had spoken little during dinner-time; but I had noticed that several times she had seemed fidgetty, as though she ought to say something to her neighbour. Now my wife had at that time a bad habit of speaking in a very loud voice--in consequence of a deaf father, and of the little society she had seen. The conversation, accordingly, had no sooner stopped (as is its wont) with a dead pause, than she turned to Grindham, and said in a tone of appalling distinctness--

"Mr Grindham, _were you ever plucked_?"

Had a trumpet been suddenly blown close to Grindham's ear, he could not have looked more thoroughly taken aback.

Caroline repeated her words with yet more frightful clearness--

"_I understand that you were plucked at Cambridge._"

Grindham's countenance grew purple; we had a room full of university men, and the insulting speech was overheard by all. There was a universal stare and stir; and Mrs Swetter seemed to be saying to herself, "what wild beast have I got here!"

Caroline, perceiving she had done something very much amiss, got frightened, and bent over her plate during the rest of dinner.

When the gentlemen came to the drawing-room, Mrs Swetter and she were sitting together. They had been talking, and Caroline's face was very red. Our eyes met: her look was full of contempt.

She has been more than my better half ever since. There never passes a day on which I am not taunted with my plucking.

THE REVOLUTIONS IN EUROPE

When an Eastern sage was desired by his sultan to inscribe on a ring the sentiment which, amidst the perpetual change of human affairs, was most descriptive of their real tendency, he engraved on it the words:--"And this, too, shall pass away." It is impossible to imagine a thought more truly and universally applicable to human affairs than that expressed in these memorable words, or more descriptive of that perpetual oscillation from good to evil, and from evil to good, which from the beginning of the world has been the invariable characteristic of the annals of man, and so evidently flows from the strange mixture of noble and generous with base and selfish inclinations, which is constantly found in the children of Adam.

"And this, too, shall pass away." The moral whirlwind which has lately swept over the states of Europe, and shaken all the kingdoms to their foundations, will subside. Old habits will in the end return--old affections revive--old desires resume their sway--old necessities become imperious. Institutions may be modified--dynasties overturned--forms of government altered--monarchs sent into exile; but the human heart remains, and will for ever remain, the same. That foundation being unaltered, the social necessities of men will in the end compel them to the old establishment of authority, under names perhaps new. Old power will revive, old rule be established, old authority be confirmed. The great body of men will still remain hewers of wood and drawers of water; because Nature never intended them for any other destination, and she has rendered them incapable of discharging the duties of any other station. Respectable, useful, and virtuous, when confined to it, they become pernicious and ridiculous when for a time withdrawn from it to be placed in another. Mind will ere long resume its sway over matter, moral over physical strength. Nations may rise in insurrection; they may destroy the existing government; they may establish a democratic or republican institution;--but that will not alter the nature of things; it will not compensate the incapacity for self-government of the great body of mankind; it will not relieve them from _the first of human necessities, that of being directed by a few_. Under one name or another--that of Decemvirs, a Triumvirate, a Committee of Public Salvation, a Directory, or a Provisional Government, the old authority is speedily evolved, only the more powerful that it has been cradled in violence. It is not the weakness, it is the irresistible strength of a democratic government which is its greatest evil. It is the iron grasp it never fails to lay on the property of others which is its principal danger, the never-failing instrument of its speedy overthrow. Property is soon swept away by it, but liberty is swept away still more quickly. A Cæsar, a Cromwell, a Napoleon, arises like an avatar to stay the wrath of Heaven let loose in the unbridled passions of men; and ages of servitude succeed one terrible and unforgotten period of popular license.

It is the more important to refer to these lasting principles in human affairs at this time that the events which have recently occurred on the Continent seem at first sight to set all former experience and history at defiance. Not only has monarchy been again overthrown, and a republic restored in France by a single urban tumult, but the contagion of the example has spread to other countries, hitherto deemed the stronghold of the conservative principle, and farthest removed from the influence of the revolutionary mania. That Italy, following in the wake of a reforming Pope, should be speedily convulsed by popular fervour, was anticipated, and might easily be understood. That Lombardy and Venice, long impatient of the Tramontane yoke, should seize the first opportunity to cast it off, was what every person acquainted with the feelings of the people in those beautiful provinces has long expected. That Prussia, the most highly educated state in Europe, and which has long murmured at the delay in conceding the popular institutions promised during the struggle with Napoleon in 1813, should make an effort now to obtain them, might be understood. That the Poles, smarting under their recent dismemberment, and mourning their lost nationality, should eagerly grasp at the shadow even of the means of restoring it, was of course to be expected. But that Austria, the most aristocratic monarchy in Europe--that Austria, without either seaports, commercial cities, or manufacturing emporiums, should be seized by the same passions, and that the monarchy which had defeated Napoleon at Aspern, and all but destroyed him at Wagram, should be overturned by an urban tumult, headed by a burgher guard and the beardless students of the university--this indeed surpassed human comprehension.

It not unnaturally induced in superstitious or highly excited minds the belief that the end of the world was approaching, or that an entire new era had opened upon human affairs, to which nothing which had preceded it could furnish any thing like a parallel. According to the temper of their minds, men and women either believed that the dark prophecies of the Revelation were about to be accomplished, and that the great battle of Armageddon was to precede the advent of the Millennium, or that the era of commercial organisation and socialist felicity was approaching, and that all the miseries of mankind were to expire amidst the universal dominion of the people. In the midst of these general hopes and fears, more experienced or practical observers fixed their eyes on the spoliation of Austria by liberalised Piedmont; of Denmark, by revolutionised Prussia; and of Lithuania, by regenerated Poland; and drew the conclusion that human selfishness was the same in all times and ages; that pirates could sail under the red as well as the black flag, and that the fervour of Louis Blanc and Lamartine would terminate in a conflict as fierce, and disasters as wide-spread, as those which followed the visions of Siêyes, and the philanthropy of Robespierre.

What is in a peculiar manner worthy of consideration in the overthrow, in so short a time, of so many of the established governments of Europe, is the facility with which they appear to have been overturned by sudden urban tumult, and the immediate submission of the whole provinces and remainder of the empire, the moment the ruling power in the capital was changed. It was not thus, in former days, either in France or any of the other European monarchies. Paris was often lost and won during the English wars, the contests of the League and the Fronde, but the provinces were not dismayed by the loss of the capital; and, in their fidelity, Charles VII. and Henry V. found the means of changing the scales of fortune, and again wresting it from the arms of rebels or strangers. Charles I. set up his standard at Northampton; and London, from the very outset of the conflict, was in the hands of the Long Parliament; but he found, in the fidelity of the northern and western counties, the means of maintaining for years a gallant conflict, in which victory more than once was on the verge of rendering triumphant the royalist cause. Berlin, during the Seven Years' War, was twice taken by the Russians; but Frederick the Great emerged victorious out of that terrible strife. Vienna, in the time of Maria Theresa, was wrested from her arms by the French and Bavarians; but she threw herself on the fidelity of the Hungarians, and, ere long, the standards of France were driven with disgrace behind the Rhine. The double capture of the same city by Napoleon did not determine the conflict between France and Austria; but a desperate struggle was subsequently maintained, with almost balanced success, at Austerlitz, Aspern, and Wagram. But now a single tumult, in which the loss of life does not equal that of an ordinary skirmish, has overthrown the greatest monarchies. That of Louis Philippe fell before fifty men had been killed in the streets of Paris; that of Prussia sank in a conflict in which one hundred and eighty-seven men fell on the popular side; and an échauffourée, which scarcely would deserve a place in military history, overturned the monarchy of Austria, within sight of the steeples of Aspern, and around the cathedral which had witnessed the victory of John Sobieski and the triumphant entry of Maria Theresa!

It is impossible not to conclude that moral and political causes have here enervated the minds of men, and weakened, to a most ruinous extent, the strength of nations. The depositaries of power have not, in general, shown themselves worthy of the trust which they held. There is no reason to suspect them of personal cowardice; but the moral courage which carries through a crisis, and so often _averts danger by venturing to face it_, appears to have been generally awanting. Men forgot the words of Napoleon, on occasion of Malet's conspiracy--"The death of a soldier would be the most glorious of all, if that of a magistrate, slain in the faithful discharge of his civil duties, were not still more honourable." Of few in these days can it be said, in the words of the poet,--

"Justum et tenacem propositi virum Non civium ardor prava jubentium, Non vultus instantis tyranni, Mente quatit solidâ; Si fractus illabatur orbis, Impavidum ferient ruinæ."

A long peace seems to have enervated the minds of the higher orders on the Continent; habitual luxury to have disinclined them to sacrifices by which it might be endangered. To slip through a crisis quietly, and with as little risk or disturbance as possible, seems to have been the great object; to avert danger at the moment, by pushing it forward to future times, the universal system. With how much success it was practised, the present deplorable state of France, Prussia, Austria, and Lombardy, sufficiently attests. The army was apparently everywhere faithful, and fought bravely; it was the want of moral courage and determination in the government which ruined every thing. They forgot the words of Mirabeau--"Such is the fate of those who hope, by concessions dictated by fear, to disarm a revolution."

But farther, the surprising facility with which the governments of these great military monarchies have been overthrown, in the late extraordinary revolutions, and the immediate submission of all the provinces to the new central power in the capital, suggests another, and a still more important consideration:--that is, the danger attendant on that system of centralisation, which, adopted by all the governments of France, monarchical and republican, for two centuries, from Imperial Rome, and from thence imitated over all Europe, has now apparently concentrated the whole strength of a state, moral as well as physical, in the capital. That such a system is very convenient; that it improves and facilitates administration in many respects, and greatly augments the national strength, when held together by unanimous feeling, and ably directed, may readily be conceded. The great power and extraordinary triumphs of Prussia under Frederick the Great, and of France under Louis XIV. and Napoleon, sufficiently demonstrate that. But what is the situation of such a centralised power when assailed, not in its circumference, but in its centre; not in the extremities, but the heart? Can any thing be expected of it but immediate submission to the power, _whatever it be_, which is in possession of the wonted seat of government, which has the command of the palace, the bank, the treasury, the post-office, and the telegraph? These revolutions, of which so much is said, cease to be national, to become merely urban movements; they are no longer an effort of plebeians against patricians, but of one set of prætorians in the capital against another. They are no longer "révolutions d'état," but "révolutions du palais." It is of no consequence who inhabits the palace--a king, a tribune, an emperor, or a decemvir. It is there, under whatever name that despotic power resides, it is discovered where the vital spring is to be found. Deprived of its capital, a centralised state, be it republican or monarchical, is Samson when shorn of his hair; it becomes the victim of any Dalilah who takes the trouble to lure it to perdition.

That this is the true character of the revolutions which have lately taken place on the Continent, and struck the world with such astonishment, from the magnitude of the changes which they involved, and the facility with which they were accomplished, is apparent on the very surface of things. They were all urban tumults, not national movements; the nation was never consulted on them at all. They were all concluded before the provinces heard of their commencement; they succeeded so easily, because the nations in which they occurred had been accustomed to obey the commands of the capital as implicitly as troops do the orders issuing from headquarters. The national consent of France, so far as it could be collected, was decidedly in favour of the Duchess of Orleans and the Count de Paris on the night of the 24th February; for two-thirds of the Chamber of Deputies were for that government. But what then? The armed mob, the prætorians of the capital, rushed in--the refractory deputies were dragged from their benches as summarily as the Council of Five Hundred were expelled from their seats by the grenadiers of Napoleon on the 18th Brumaire; a voice called "_C'est trop tard. A l'Hotel de Ville! Vive la Republique!_" and the Orleans dynasty was overthrown, and universal suffrage established. In Prussia the whole affair was a combat in the capital, between fifteen thousand regular troops and thirty thousand trained and disciplined citizens, (every man in Prussia is bred a soldier;) and after one hundred and eighty-seven men on the popular side had been killed, the King yielded, and the nation rushed headlong, from absolute despotism to household suffrage, equal electoral districts, and a single National Assembly. This is just the Cadiz constitution of 1812, which has ever since been the rallying point of the democrats throughout the south of Europe, over again. It was the same at Vienna: the whole affair there was determined in a single day, before intelligence of the commencement of the revolt had reached either Lintz or Presburg. It is ridiculous to talk of these as _national_ movements, or revolutions of the state: they are mere urban tumults, originating in a struggle for the dictatorship in the capital, and decided without the sense of the nation being taken either on the one side or the other.

But, most of all, these Continental revolutions teach a lesson of inestimable importance to the people of this country, and which recent events have so well illustrated, as to the incalculable value of a hereditary order of succession in the government, supported by hereditary respect, and resting on the _disinterested_ loyalty of the people. It is in vain to conceal that it was the fact of its being a _usurping government_ which proved fatal, in the crisis of its fate, to the monarchy of Louis Philippe. He was the King of the Barricades, and how could he withstand the force of the Barricades? It was the same with the government of Robespierre, the Directory, and Napoleon: they were all usurpations, and fell before the power which had created them. They had not taken root in the loyal and generous affections of men. The dynasty of Cromwell perished with himself; Charles II. was restored amidst the unanimous transports of the whole nation. It was the same with the government of Great Britain for long after the Revolution of 1688: it is well known that, during the last years of the reign of Queen Anne, it was almost an open question in both houses of parliament, whether the Stuart line should be restored, or the Hanoverian family, in terms of the Act of Settlement, be called to the throne. The devastating civil wars and bloody contests of the Prætorian Guards with the legions, which stained with blood the annals, and shortened the existence of the Roman empire, may show what is the fate of a great nation which, having cast away the bonds of hereditary loyalty, has nothing to be guided by, in the choice of a ruler, but the blind partiality of armed men, or the corrupted support of interested hirelings. It will be long before either will produce the fidelity of the Scottish Highlanders in 1745, or the glories of La Vendée in 1793. Usurpation of the throne is a sure prelude to endless dissension, national corruption, and endangered freedom. The expulsion of the Tarquins brought Rome to the brink of ruin; its effects were not removed for two centuries. England took nearly a century to recover the effects of the most just and necessary revolution in which men were ever engaged--that which chased James II. from the throne. Our present stability, amidst the fall of so many other governments, is mainly owing to this, that by the long possession of the throne by her ancestors, Queen Victoria unites in her person the two firmest foundations of regal power--a nation's consent, and a nation's loyalty.

If any doubt could exist as to the importance of the barrier which the government of Louis Philippe and the administration of M. Guizot opposed to the torrent of revolutionary anarchy, and the ascendant of selfish ambition, it would be removed by the dreadful nature of the events which have since taken place, or are in progress, in every part of Europe. Never was so clearly demonstrated the incalculable moment of the restraint which religion, law, and order impose on the rapacious and selfish passions of men, or the truth of Hobbes' doctrine that the natural state of man is a state of war. Instantly, as if by magic, the world has been thrown into confusion; and out of the chaos have arisen not the virtuous and benevolent, but the vicious and aggrandising propensities. While "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" are in every mouth, "tyranny, rapacity, enmity" are in every heart. A legion of demons seem to have been suddenly let loose upon the world; the original devil was expelled, but straightway he returned with seven other devils, worse than himself, and the last state was worse than the first. Kings and Kaisars, ministers and generals, demagogues and aristocrats, seem to have become alike seized with the universal contagion. In the general scramble, when society seemed to be breaking up, as in the horrors of a shipwreck or the disasters of a retreat, all subordination has been lost, all sense of rectitude passed away, and the prevailing principle appears to have been to make the most of the crisis to the purpose of separate advantage.

The great parent republic took the lead in this demoniac race. From the very first, its steps were disgraced by rapine and robbery; by the most audacious violation of vested rights, and the most shameful disregard of private interests. The first thing they did was to burn the railway stations, and expel with savage barbarity several thousand inoffensive and industrious English and Belgian labourers and artisans, without their wages or their effects, from the French territory. The next was, to confiscate the savings' banks throughout France--virtually destroying thereby nine-tenths of the accumulated savings of French industry since the peace. The suspension of cash payments soon after lowered the value of all realised property a third. A heavy addition (45 per cent) was imposed on direct taxes: the period of payment anticipated by six months. Fifty millions of francs (£2,000,000) was next exacted from the Bank of France without interest; the "Bons du Trésor Royal" (Exchequer Bills) were thrown overboard; a _progressive_ income-tax is hinted at; and Government have now openly commenced the work of spoliation by seizing upon the Paris and Orleans and Orleans and Vierzon railways, and directing their whole proceeds, averaging 200,000 francs (£8000) a week, to be paid into the public treasury! This is done without a hint at disapprobation, or even an expression of dissent, from the whole press of France. Nay, they have now taken to stopping, like footpads, common travellers, and forcing them to give up their specie in exchange for worthless paper. We doubt if the whole history of mankind contains an account of the perpetration, in so short a time, of so many acts of rapacity, or such an instance of the slavish degradation into which the press has fallen.

Lord Brougham, a great liberal authority in his day, has given, in the House of Peers, the following graphic and characteristic account of the state of France at this time, (April 17,) from which he has just returned:--

"The present condition of Paris, if it continue for any time, would inevitably effect the ruin of that glorious country. Paris governs France, and a handful of the mob govern Paris. He hoped and trusted that they would live to see better times. He hoped that what they now saw passing before their eyes--the general want of credit, the utter impossibility of commerce going on, the complete ruin of trade in the capital and great towns, the expedients to which the Provisional Government finds itself compelled to have recourse day by day to perpetuate its existence, and to make its ephemeral being last--one day taking possession of the banks of deposit to the robbery of the poor--another, stopping the supplies of the rich--a third day stopping travellers for the purpose of taking their money from them (hear, hear, and laughter) at the barriers, upon the ground that the town was in want of cash. He hoped, he said, that they would soon see such an unsettled state of things give way to a more firm form of government. He knew some of those individuals who had severely suffered by these circumstances--(hear, and laughter)--but he should inform their Lordships that he was not here present. (Continued laughter.) Although it was a pity to spoil their merriment, he yet rejoiced in being able to show them that there was not a shadow of foundation for the report which had been circulated respecting himself; when he came to the barrier, the circumstance occurred which had no doubt given rise to the story. He was told that he should stop in order that his baggage might be examined. On requiring further explanation for this conduct, he was informed that the inquiry was sought for _for the purpose of seeing whether he had any money_. (Laughter.) He had heard a great deal respecting the misgovernment of former rulers, but he had never heard of such a step as this being tolerated. He knew one person _from whom they took 200,000 francs, giving him bank paper instead_. The state of trade in that country was dreadful--the funds falling suddenly from 70 to 32; the bank stopping, notwithstanding the order for the suspension of cash-payments; the taking possession of one of the railways, with the proceeds, amounting to about £8000 a-week, which were put into Louis Blanc's pocket to be dispensed again according to his peculiar theory. In the same way, it was said, the Provisional Government intended to act with all the other railways. They had, no doubt, a right to do all this, if they pleased, and also, as it was rumoured they intended to do, to seize the bank, and to issue a paper currency to a very large amount. He only hoped that at the meeting of the National Assembly, they would open their eyes to the necessity of taking such steps as to prevent that mischief to which such experiments as these were likely to lead. (Hear, hear.) He believed that the certain result of such a government would be this--that they would be stricken down with imbecility, and would become too weak to perform the ordinary functions of a government. They might struggle on for a time, until some military commander would rise and destroy the Republic, and perhaps plant in its place a military despotism. At this moment he was of opinion that any one general, with 10,000 men, marching into Paris, would have the effect of at once putting an end to the Republic. No man could doubt it. The Belgian ambassador the other day had applied to M. Lamartine for protection; the latter said in reply, he admitted the full right of the ambassador to such protection, but he had not really three men at his disposal. The people in Paris were as uneasy as any persons could be at this state of things, but they have made up their minds to the fact that this experiment of a Republic must be tried; so that France must remain a Republic for some time, whether it be for her advantage or not."--_Morning Chronicle_, April 13, 1848.

Wretched as this account of the present state of France is, its prospects are if possible still more deplorable. The misery brought on the working-classes by the ruin of commerce, destruction of credit, and flight of the opulent foreigners, is such that it is absolutely sickening to contemplate it. _Seventy-five thousand persons_ are out of employment in Paris alone, which, with the usual number of dependents, must imply two hundred thousand human beings in a state of destitution. The only way of supporting this enormous mass of indigence is by maintaining it as an armed force; and it is said that 200,000 idlers are in this way paid thirty sous a-day to keep them from plundering the capital! But the resources of no country, far less one shipwrecked in capital, trade, and industry, can withstand such a strain. The following is one of the latest accounts of the financial and social condition of France, by an able observer on the spot:--

"The time is now fast approaching when the pecuniary resources left in the treasury at the revolution will be exhausted. The old loan has ceased to be paid up. The new loan remains a barren failure. The regular taxes are paid with reluctance, and are not paid beforehand except in Paris. The additional impost of 45 centimes (near 50 per cent on the direct taxes) is positively refused as illegal by the rural districts and provincial cities. The stock of bullion in the Bank of France decreases, and, in short, the progress of financial ruin goes steadily on. We pointed out some weeks ago the exact and inevitable course of this decline, and we now read in a French journal of repute the precise confirmation of our predictions:--'We are now,' says the _Journal des Debats_, 'but two steps removed from a complete system of paper-money; and if we enter on that system, we shall not get out of it again _short of the total ruin of private persons and of the state_, after having passed through the most rigorous distress; for it would be the suspension of production and of exchange.' The plan proposed, though not yet sanctioned by the Provisional Government, seems to be a _general seizure and incorporation with the state of all the great financial and trading companies, such as the Bank of France, the railways, the canals, mines, &c._, and the issue of a vast amount of paper by the state on the alleged credit of this property--in short, a _pure inconvertible system of assignats_. Monstrous as such a proposal appears, we are inclined to think that the rapid disappearance of the precious metals will render some such scheme inevitable, and it will be the form given to the bankruptcy and ruin of the nation."--_Times_, 14th April.

In the midst of these woful circumstances, the Provisional Government does not for a moment intermit in the inflaming the public mind by the most fallacious and false promises of boundless future prosperity from the adherence to republican principles, and the return of stanch republicans to the approaching assembly. In the same able journal it is observed,--

"We have now before us a handbill entitled the _Bulletin de la Republique_, and printed on white paper, the distinctive mark of _official_ proclamations, headed, moreover, with the words "Ministère de l'Intérieur." This document is one of those semi-officially circulated, as we understand, by M. LEDRU ROLLIN, for the purpose of exciting the Republican party. A more disastrous appeal to popular passions, and a more delusive pledge to remedy all human sufferings, we never read; for after having laid to the charge of existing laws _all_ the miseries of a poor man's lot, heightened by inflammatory description, the working classes are told that 'henceforth society will give them _employment, food, instruction, honour, air, and daylight_. It will watch over the preservation of their lives, their _health, their intelligence, their dignity_. It will give asylum to the aged, work for their hands, confidence to their hearts, and rest to their nights. It will watch over the virtue of their daughters, the requisite provision for their children, and the obsequies of the dead.' In a word, this exceptional and transitory power, whose very form and existence are still undefined, announces some necromantic method of interposing between man and all the laws of his existence on this globe--of suspending the principles of human nature, as it has already done those of society--and of changing the whole aspect of human life. No delusions can be so enormous: the word is too good for them--_they are frauds_; and these frauds are put forward by men who know well enough that the effect of the present crisis already is, and will be much more hereafter, to plunge the very classes to whom these promises are made _into the lowest depths of human suffering_."--_Times_, 14th April.

One of the most instructive facts as to the ruinous effect of the late Revolution on the best interests of French industry, is to be found in the progressive and rapid decline in the value of all French securities, public and private, since it took place. It distinctly appears that _two-thirds of the capital of France has been destroyed since the Revolution_, in the short space of six weeks! Attend to the fall in the value of the public funds during that brief but disastrous period:--

French 3 per cents. 5 per cents.

Fr. Ct. Fr. Ct. 1825 76 35 July 23 1817 69 0 July 29 1829 86 16 Dec. 5 1821 90 60 Nov. 2 1830 85 35 Jan. 18 1822 95 0 Sept. 5 1831 70 50 Dec. 2 1824 104 80 Feb. 5 1834 85 50 Nov. 30 1828 109 0 Sept. 4 1840 86 65 July 22 1829 110 65 Mar. 4 1844 85 65 Dec. 22 1831 98 30 Dec. 15 1845 86 40 May 20 1835 110 36 Feb. 4 1846 85 0 Feb. 28 1837 111 0 Sept. 5 1847 80 30 Jan. 2 1841 117 5 Sept. 4 1848 47 0 Mar. 15 1844 126 30 Mar. 4 1848 41 27 Mar. 28 1847 119 40 Feb. 22 1848 35 67 April 1 1848 116 75 Feb. 22 1848 34 64 April 5 1848 97 50 {fell to 80 Mar. 7.} 1848 33 10 April 14 1848 65 80 April 2 1848 51 0 April 12

_La Presse_, March 12, and _Times_ since that date.

The value of railway stock and bank shares has declined in a still more alarming proportion. Bank shares, which in 1824 sold for 3400 francs, are now selling at 900 francs--or little more than A FOURTH of their former value. Railway stock is unsaleable, being marked out for immediate confiscation. Taking one kind of stock with another, it may safely be affirmed that TWO-THIRDS _of the capital of France has perished since the Revolution, in the short space of seven weeks_. The fruit of thirty-three years' peace, hard labour, and penurious saving, has disappeared in seven weeks of anarchical transports!! Of course, the means of employing the people have declined in the same proportion; for where credit is annihilated, how is industry to be maintained, before its produce comes in, but by realised capital? How is its produce to be disposed of if two-thirds of the classes possessed of property have been rendered bankrupt? Already this difficulty has been experienced in France. The Paris papers of 13th April announce that seventy-five thousand persons will be employed at the "ateliers Nationaux," or public workshops, at 30 sous a-day, in the end of April--at a cost of 112,500 francs a-day, or 3,375,000 francs, (£150,000) a-month. This is in addition to an armed force of above 100,000 men, paid for the most part two francs a-day for doing nothing. No exchequer in the world can stand such a strain; far less that of a bankrupt and revolutionised country like France. It is no wonder that the French funds are down at 32, and an issue of assignats--in other words, the open and avowed destruction of all realised property--is seriously contemplated.

This is exactly the condition to which France was brought during the Reign of Terror, when the _whole_ inhabitants of Paris fell as a burden on the government, and the cost of the 680,000 rations daily issued to them, exceeded that of the fourteen armies which combated on the frontiers for the Republic. In those days the misery in Paris, the result of the Revolution, was so extreme, that the bakers' shops were besieged day and night without intermission by a famishing crowd; and the unhappy applicants were kept all night waiting during a severe frost, with a rope in their hands, and the thermometer often down at 5° Fahrenheit, to secure their place for the distribution when the doors were opened. There is nothing new in the condition of France and Paris at this time: it has been seen and experienced in every age of the world; it has been familiar to the East for three thousand years. The principle that the state is the universal proprietor, the middle class the _employés_ of government, and the labouring class the servants of the state, is exactly the oriental system of government. It is just the satraps and fellahs of Persia--the mandarins and peasants of China--the zemindars and ryots of Hindostan over again. Exact parallels to the armed and insolent rabble who now lord it over Paris, and through it over France, may be found in the Prætorians of Rome--the Mamelukes of Egypt--the Janissaries of Constantinople. The visions of perfectibility and utopian projects of Louis Blanc, Lamartine, and Ledru Rollin, have already landed the social interests of France in the straits of the Reign of Terror--its practical government in the armed despotism of the Algerine pirates, or the turbulent sway of the Sikh soldiery.

But the contagion of violence, the ascendant of ambition, the lust of rapine have not been confined to the armed janissaries of Paris, or their delegates the Provisional Government. They have extended to other countries: they have spread to other states. They have infected governments as well as their subjects; they have disgraced the throne as well as the workshop. Wherever a revolution has been successful, and liberal governments have been installed, there a system of _foreign aggression_ has instantly commenced. The first thing which the revolutionary government of Piedmont did, was to invade Lombardy, and drive the Austrian armies beyond the Po; the first exploit of constitutional Prussia, to pour into Sleswig to spoliate Denmark. Open preparations for revolutionising Lithuania are made in the grand-duchy of Posen. A war has already commenced on the Po and the Elbe; it is imminent on the Vistula. Lamartine's reply to the Italian deputation proves that France is prepared, on the least reverse to the Sardinian arms, to throw her sword into the scale; his conduct in permitting an armed rabble to set out from Paris to invade Belgium, and another from Lyons to revolutionise Savoy, that the extension of the frontier of France to the Rhine and the Alps is still the favourite project of the French republic. If he declines to do so, the armed prætorians of Paris will soon find another foreign minister who will. France has 600,000 men in arms: Austria 500,000: 150,000 Russians will soon be on the Vistula. Hardly was uttered Mr Cobden's memorable prophecy of the approach of a pacific millennium, and a universal turning of swords into spinning-jennies, when the dogs of war were let slip in every quarter of Europe. Hardly was M. Lamartine's hymn of "liberty, equality, fraternity," chanted, when the reign of internal spoliation and external violence commenced in France, and rapidly extended as far as its influence was felt throughout the world.

"And this, too, shall pass away." The reign of injustice is not eternal: it defeats itself by its own excesses: the avenging angel is found in the human heart. In the darkest days of humanity, this great law of nature is unceasingly acting, and preparing in silence the renovation of the world. It will bring about the downfall of the prætorian bands who now rule France, as it brought about the overthrow of Robespierre, the fall of Napoleon. The revolutionary tempest which is now sweeping over Europe cannot long continue. The good sense of men will reassume its sway after having violently reeled: the feelings of religion and morality will come up to the rescue of the best interests of humanity: the generous will yet combat the selfish feelings: the spirit of heaven will rise up against that of hell. It is in the eternal warfare between these opposite principles, that the true secret of the whole history of mankind is to be found: in the alternate triumph of the one and the other, that the clearest demonstration is to be discerned of the perpetual struggle between the noble and generous and selfish and corrupt desires which for ever actuate the heart of man.

"To rouse effort by the language of virtue," says Mr Alison, "and direct it to the purposes of vice, is the great art of revolution." What a commentary on these words have recent events afforded! Judging by the language of the revolutionists, they are angels descended upon earth. Nothing but gentleness, justice, philanthropy is to be seen in their expressions: nothing but liberty, equality, fraternity in their maxims. Astræa appears to have returned to the world: the lion and the kid have lain down together--Justice and Mercy have kissed each other. Judging by their actions, a more dangerous set of ruffians never obtained the direction of human affairs: justice was never more shamelessly set at nought in measures, robbery never more openly perpetrated by power. Their whole career has been one uninterrupted invasion of private rights; their whole power is founded on continual tribute to the selfish desire of individual aggrandisement among their followers. We do not ascribe this deplorable contrast between words and actions to any peculiar profligacy or want of conscience in the Provisional Government. Some of them are men of powerful intellect or fine genius; all, we believe, are sincere and well-meaning men. But "Hell is paved with good intentions." They are pushed on by a famishing crowd in their rear, whom they are alike unable to restrain or to feed. They are fanatics, and fanatics of the most dangerous kind--devout believers in human perfectibility, credulous assertors of the natural innocence of man. Thence their enormous error--thence the enormous evils they have brought upon the world--thence the incalculable importance of the great _experimentum crucis_ as to the justice of these principles which is now taking place upon the earth.

To give one instance, among many, of the way in which these regenerators of society proceed to spoliate their neighbours, it is instructive to refer to the proposals officially promulgated by the Provisional Government, in their interview with the railway proprietors of France, whom, by one sweeping act, it was proposed to "_absorb_" into the state. The Minister of the Interior stated that it was proposed to "purchase" the shares of the proprietors; and the word "purchase" sounded well, and was doubtless a balm to many a quaking heart, expecting unqualified confiscation. But he soon explained what sort of "purchase" it was which was in contemplation. He said that it was the intention of Government to "absorb" all the railway shares throughout France; to take the shares at the _current price in the market_, and give the proprietors not money but _rentes_, or public securities, to the same amount! That is, having first, by means of the revolution, lowered the current value of railway stock to a twentieth, or, in some cases, a fiftieth part of what it was previous to that convulsion, they next proceed to _estimate it at_ that depreciated value, and then pay the unhappy holders, not in cash, but in Government securities, themselves lowered to a third of their value, and perhaps ere long worth nothing. A more shameful instance of spoliation, veiled under the fine names of "absorption," centralisation, and the like, never was heard of; but the Minister of the Interior had two conclusive arguments to adduce on the subject. Some of the railway lines at least were "paying concerns," and the republic must have cash; and all of them afforded work for the labouring classes, and Government must find employment for the unemployed.

To such a length have these communist and socialist projects proceeded in Paris, that a great effort of all the holders of property was deemed indispensable to arrest them. The effort was made on Monday, 17th April; but it is hard to say whether the dreaded evils or the boasted demonstration were most perilous, or most descriptive of the present social condition of the French capital. Was it by argument in the public journals, or by influencing the electors for the approaching Assembly, or even by discussion at the Clubs, as in the days of the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, that the thing was done? Quite the reverse: it was effected by a demonstration of _physical strength_. They took a leaf out of the book of the Chartists--they copied the processions of the Janissaries in the Atmeidan of Constantinople. The National Guard, _two hundred and twenty thousand strong_, mustered on the streets of Paris: they shouted out, "A bas les Communistes!"--"A bas Blanqui!"--"Vive le Gouvernement Provisoire!" and the Parisians flattered themselves the thing was done. Is not the remedy worse than the disease? What were fifteen thousand unarmed workmen spouting socialist speeches in the Champs de Mars to 200,000 armed National Guards, dictating their commands alike to the Provisional Government and the National Assembly! Was ever a capital handed over to such a lusty band of metropolitan janissaries? What chance is there of freedom of deliberation in the future Assembly in presence of such formidable spectators in the galleries? Already M. Ledru Rollin is calculating on their ascendancy. Like all persons engaged in a successful insurrection--in other words, who have been guilty of treason--he is haunted by a continual, and in the circumstances ridiculous, dread of a counter-revolution; and in his circular of 15th April, he openly avows the principle that Paris is the soul of France; that it is the advanced guard of Freedom, not for itself alone, but the whole earth; and that the departments must not think of gainsaying the will of their sovereign leaders, or making the cause retrograde, in which all nations are finally to be blessed.

The account of this extraordinary demonstration, given in the Paris correspondence of the _Times_ of 19th April, is so characteristic and graphic, that we cannot forbear the satisfaction of laying it before our readers. It recalls the preludes to the worst days of the first Revolution.

"Ever since the appearance of this bold defiance to the moderate majority in the Provisional Government, and its announcement that 'the gauntlet was thrown down--the death-struggle was at hand,' the city has naturally been in a state of subdued ferment. Various reports, some of the most extravagant kind, were circulated from mouth to mouth. It was said that the majority of the members of the Government intended retreating to the Tuileries, and fortifying their position--that a collision between the violent and moderate parties was imminent--that the Ultras, led by Blanqui, were to profit by a new manifestation in favour of a further delay in the general elections, and against the admission of the military into the city upon the occasion of the great fraternisation _fete_, in order to upset the moderate party in the Government; in fine, that Ledru Rollin, with two or three of his colleagues, was instigating, aiding, and abetting Blanqui in this movement to get rid of that majority of his other colleagues that thwarted his designs. Whatever the truth of all these rumours, the alarm was general. It soon became generally known that a monster meeting of the working classes was to be held in the Champ de Mars on the Sunday, and that Messrs Louis Blanc and Albert, instigated, it was said, by the Minister of the Interior, had convoked this assembly. The Ultra party, it was added, designed to make use of this manifestation in order to forward the schemes already mentioned. This was the state of things on Sunday morning. In the Champ de Mars, a little after noon, the scene was certainly an exciting one. Delegates of all the trades and guilds of Paris were assembled, to the number of nearly 100,000 men. Banners were waving in all directions, and the fermenting crowd filled about a third of the vast space of the plain. It was with difficulty that an explanation could be obtained of the real object of the meeting. Its ostensible object, however, appeared to be the election from among the working classes of fourteen officers for the staff of the National Guard; although other motives, such as the choice of candidates among them for the general elections, and various deputations to the Government upon various matters connected with the endless organisation of work, were also put forward. There is every reason to believe that the greater part of the meeting had in reality no other object in view, and that the other secret intrigues fomented by the Blanqui party were confined, at all events, to but a chosen few. About two o'clock the monster procession began to move towards the Hotel de Ville. Along the outer boulevards, along the esplanade of the Invalides, over the Pont de la Concorde, and along the quays, it moved on, like a huge serpent, bristling with tricoloured banners. The head of the monster appeared to have nearly reached its destination before the tail had fully left the Champ de Mars. In passing through the Faubourg St Germain, I found the _rappel_ beating in every street; the National Guards were hurrying to their places of meeting, columns were marching forward; in every mouth was the cry that the Provisional Government was in danger from the _anarchists_ of the Ultra party.

On reaching the quays, I found every thing in a state of revolution. They were already lined, literally from one end to the other, by files of the National Guards; other battalions were advancing towards the Hotel de Ville; the legions of the _Garde Mobile_ were hurrying in the same direction, and seemed, as far as I could judge, animated by the same spirit of resistance as the National Guards to the supposed _coup-de-main_ expected to be directed against the majority of the Government. It was with difficulty that the advancing legions could proceed along with the monster procession, which seemed surprised and stupified by the force displayed. Thousands upon thousands of spectators crowded the long thoroughfare also, all endeavouring to push on to the scene of action. I reached at last the Place de l'Hotel de Ville; it appeared a very sea of bayonets; a small space only was left for the passage of the procession. The force of the armed citizens of the National Guards and the _Garde Mobile_ made certainly a tremendous show. In this state matters remained upon the Place for about four hours, during which the members of the Government were employed probably in receiving the delegates of the monster meeting of the working classes. From time to time, however, when they appeared at the windows of the old building, shouts were raised by the Guards, and the caps, hats, shakos, képys, and all the other variations of _coiffure_, that suddenly burst up, like a forest, into the air upon every bayonet point, had a most singular effect. This was repeated continually. During the whole of this long scene, in which such of the armed force as filled the Place kept its position, the ferment among the surrounding crowd was intense. Several _hommes du peuple_ were in a very angry and excited state; they declared that the working classes were insulted by this demonstration of the National Guards; that the National Guards were the enemies of the people; that the people must rise once more against them, &c. The cry against the Moderates was raised under the name of "_reactionaires_" and "_faux republicains_;" the counter cry was "_anarchie_" and "_communisme_." Several times the angry parties among the spectators were on the point of coming to blows, and much hustling took place. This state of things remained the same when I left the Place de l'Hotel de Ville at six o'clock. In addition to the lines of National Guards that still occupied the quays, battalions after battalions of the different legions were still pouring along towards the Hotel de Ville even at that hour. The advancing columns reached through the Place du Carrousel far upon the Rue de Rivoli. They were hurrying on as quickly as the intense press permitted them, shouting almost universally, "_A bas les Anarchistes!_" or more commonly, for that was the real rallying cry, "_A bas les Communistes!_" General Courtais, with his staff, was riding up and down among the advancing ranks, declaring, as far as I could hear, that the Government was _no longer_ in danger, but thanking them for this demonstration of their desire to support it.--_Times_, 19th April.

On the following night, (Monday 17,) attacks were made by the Communists on the Treasury, the Hotel de Ville, and several other posts; but they were defeated by the National Guard.

It thus appears that the Provisional Government, before it has been seven weeks in office, is already passed in the career of revolution by a force from below! It is fain to summon the National Guard for its protection, and to receive the petitions of the _proletaires_ and _ouvriers_ from the Champ de Mars, surrounded not by the love of the people, but the bayonets of sixty thousand National Guards grouped round the Hotel de Ville! Insane projects of communism, and the division of all profits among the workmen, without leaving any thing for the profits of stock, have made such progress among them, that in a few weeks the Provisional Government is accused of imitating the conduct of Louis Philippe, because they do not forthwith adopt these without limitation, and are significantly warned to avoid his fate. It is evident that the destiny of the whole civilised world is wound up with allowing these communist ideas in France to run their course unmolested, and work out their appropriate and inevitable fruits.

We anticipate no good from the revolution in Prussia. We are well aware, indeed, of the intelligence and energy of that gallant people. We know that her inhabitants are the most highly educated of any people in Europe, and second to none in patriotism and spirit. Prussia is capable, in good time, and from her _own exertions_, of working out the elements of constitutional freedom. But we distrust all revolutions brought about by example. Contagion never yet spread the spirit of real freedom: foreign imitation may for a while overthrow existing governments, but it cannot establish new ones in their stead on a durable foundation. The Republic of Rienzi, who, according to the fine expression of Madame de Stael, "mistook recollections for hopes," perished in a few years without leaving a wreck behind. Where are now the Batavian, Cisalpine, Ligurian, and Parthenopeian Republics, which arose during the fervour of the first Revolution around the great parent Republic? What has been the result of the revolutionary mania which in 1820 threw down the established government in Piedmont, Naples, Spain, or Portugal? What has become of the Republics of South America, which borrowed their institutions from the French or Spanish model? Has any one of these countries obtained real freedom in consequence of their exertions? Have they not all, on the contrary, suffered dreadfully, and in nothing so much as their capacity for liberty, from their effects? Has not capital been so abridged, industry so blighted, security so endangered, violence so general, that the cause of freedom has been postponed for centuries, if not rendered entirely hopeless, from the triumph of foreign imported liberalism? Whatever it may effect elsewhere, _free-trade in revolutions_ does nothing but evil in society. Nothing but what is of home growth, in constitutions at least, can succeed there. It is difficult enough to make the tree of liberty prosper even where it is indigenous in the earth; but who ever heard of a _transplanted tree of liberty_ thriving in the soil to which it was transferred?

Already all the usual and well-known effects of successful revolution are to be seen in Berlin. Extravagant ideas among the working classes,--visions of unbounded felicity in all. Hopes that can never be realised,--expectations inconsistent with the first laws of society. In the midst of this chaos of excitement, transports, and chimerical projects, have come the inevitable attendants on such an assault on the established interests and order of society,--shaken credit, frequent bankruptcy, diminished employment, a falling revenue, augmented discontent, foreign warfare, general suffering. These effects follow so universally and invariably from the triumph of Revolution, that they may be fairly set down as its inevitable results. It is in the midst of this scene of danger, excitement, and tribulation, that Prussia, without the least previous preparation for it, is to plunge at once into _universal suffrage_, equal electoral districts, and a deputy for every 50,000 souls! England, with its centuries of freedom, cautious habits, realised wealth, and opulent middle classes, could not withstand such a constitution. The abolition of the national debt, of the house of peers, and a division of property, would follow from it in three months. What, then, is to be expected from Prussia, which, so far from having served an apprenticeship to freedom, is not yet entered with the craft?

So strange and sudden has been the revolt at Vienna, that it is scarcely possible to conceive that it can be of lasting effects. The framework of society there, the habits of the people, the ideas prevalent among them, are essentially aristocratic. The change in the government was entirely the work of a few thousand ardent students and discontented burghers in the capital. There is no material suffering in the Austrian provinces: Chartism is not there, as here, fanned by the misery produced by free-trade and a contracted currency. In these circumstances, it is not unlikely that, after the first blush of the insurrection is over, and men begin to consider in what respect they have benefited by it, there will be a general inclination to return to the former government. Probably a few concessions--as of a national Diet, where the wants of the country may be made known by a majority, still composed of nobles and landed proprietors--will satisfy the general wish. Old feelings will revive, old ideas return, old habits retain their ascendancy; foreign warfare will make the national supersede the social passions. It will be with them as was said of the first French Revolution in La Vendée,--giving privileges to the people is like casting water on a higher level--it speedily finds its way to the lower. The Revolution of 1848 in Vienna will be--like that of Jack Cade in England, or Rienzi in Italy, and all similar movements in countries not prepared for them--a brief and painful effort which leaves not a trace behind. But this much may without the least hesitation be predicted. If this return to old feelings and habits does not take place--and Austria, with its various races, provinces, and interests, and accustomed submission to authority, is really revolutionised, its power will be annihilated, its provinces partitioned, its people enslaved, its happiness destroyed, and a fatal breach made in the great Germanic barrier which separates French Insurrection from Russian Absolutism.

What a contrast to the storms which now agitate and have so profoundly shaken the Continental states does the aspect of Great Britain at the same period afford? We, too, have our dangers: we have our Chartists and our Repealers: the whole force of revolution in this island, and of insurrection in the neighbouring one, have been directed to assail and overturn the constitution. This treasonable attempt, too, has been made at a time of all others most likely to give it success: when the ruinous dogmas of free-trade had paralysed industry, and of a gold currency had shattered it; when bankruptcies to an unheard of extent had shaken commerce to its centre, and an unexampled number of persons in all the manufacturing districts were thrown out of employment. Yet even in these, the most favourable of all circumstances for the success of sedition, when real and wide-spread internal suffering is aggravated by vehement external excitement, how has it fared with the revolutionists? Their treasonable designs have been every where met with calm resolution by the Government and the country; and with scarce any effusion of blood, without a contest which can be dignified with the name of rebellion, without a single execution, as yet at least, on the scaffold, their designs have been rendered abortive. The Press has stood nobly forward on this momentous crisis; and to its ability and truly patriotic spirit, the defeat of the disaffected, without bloodshed, is mainly to be ascribed. England has shown one instance at least of an empire saved by the unbought loyalty of her people and the free independence of her Press. The metropolis has set a splendid example of mingled patriotism and firmness: and Europe, which expected to see the treason of the Chartists triumphant on the 10th of April, and another republic, proclaimed on the banks of the Thames, was astonished to behold their boasted multitudes shrink from a contest with six thousand soldiers supported by an equal number of police. Beyond all question, it was the glorious display of public spirit then made by the middle and higher classes, who came forward to a man to defend the cause of order, which paralysed the audacity of the revolutionists, and saved the empire from the horrors of hopeless indeed, but in any event disastrous, civil warfare.

The following observations by a distinguished journal, long known for its able and intrepid defence of the cause of religion and order, put this memorable event in its true light:--

"The _eleventh of April_, in the year 1848, has arrived, and the United Kingdom is still a _monarchy_. The day, the great day, which was to revolutionise the nation, and to establish a republic on the French model, has passed over, and we find no change. The Parliament sits at its ease as heretofore; the courts of law administer justice as heretofore; and the officers of the executive are transacting the business of the Government without molestation. All other business, too, is proceeding in its ordinary course.

"A better means of estimating the strength of the Chartists than has yet been afforded, was afforded by the exhibition yesterday on Kennington Common. The five millions and a half mustered 10,000, or, to take the highest estimate, 15,000. It may be said that these were the Chartists of London and its neighbourhood; but though we have shown that this is not the fact, let it be so,--London and its neighbourhood comprise a population of two millions, giving five hundred thousand men of military age. Of these, then, but 15,000 at most--we say but 10,000--are Chartists: 1 _in_ 500 _according to our estimate_, 1 in about 330 according to the higher estimate of the number on the common.

"Let us now turn to the more pleasing side of yesterday's proceedings; and let us, in the first place, acknowledge the true fountain of domestic peace, and of every other blessing--'UNLESS THE LORD KEEPETH THE CITY, THE WATCHMAN WAKETH BUT IN VAIN.' To the bounty of Divine Providence we owe it, that this morning we arise in peace to pursue our peaceful occupations. May we not add, with humility, that to the Giver of all good we owe the honour that the metropolis of England has won, in setting to the world an example of a peaceful victory over the worst spirit of rebellion, encouraged by the triumph of rebellion in almost every other capital of Europe. Yes, it is to Him, and to the teaching of His word, the glory is due.

"We have told the number of _Chartists_; now what was the number of _special constables_?--Two hundred thousand; the _Morning Chronicle_ says, we believe truly, two hundred and fifty thousand--no sickly spectres, like those whose perverse activity summoned them from their usual avocations, but the _manhood_ of the metropolis, from the high-spirited nobility and gentry downward, through all the gradations of society, to the strong-armed artisan, and the robust drayman or coal-whipper. Yes, the special constables enrolled yesterday presented a body for spirit, strength, and number, not to be matched, out of Great Britain, on the face of the earth. How truly did we say a few weeks ago, that every Sunday saw meekly kneeling in the churches of the metropolis a body of men that could laugh to scorn the assault of any enemy, foreign or domestic, that could by possibility be brought to confront them. These men look for spirit, and strength, and safety in the right quarter, and _they themselves_ yesterday exhibited the proof.

"The military preparations of the Government were prudent, as providing against the danger of local success on the part of the enemies of order, but it is plain that they did not operate by terror, for a soldier was not to be seen; it was _the little staff of the special constable_ that quelled sedition, and it is right that this should be known to all our foreign enemies, and to domestic traitors, as proof beyond all doubt that the people of England are firmly united in defence of their constitution."--_Standard_, April 11.

That the Chartists fully expected a Revolution to be effected in London that day is decisively proved by their conduct in the provinces. At Glasgow, a placard appeared, headed

"THREATENED REVOLUTION IN LONDON;"

and invited the people to be ready to come out by their thousands and tens of thousands, the moment farther intelligence was received. The "absorption" of the Electric Telegraph by Government was a sad blow to them, for it left them at a loss how to act.

It is impossible to exaggerate the moral guilt of the movement thus happily defeated by the firmness of the Government and the loyalty of the immense majority of the people. Situated as the Continent now is--with capital destroyed and credit ruined in France; war imminent, and commerce paralysed in Germany; and hostilities actually raging in Italy, it is evident that Great Britain, if secure of internal tranquillity, may again, as during the war, become the workshop and emporium of the world. Secure within her sea-girt shores, protected alike by her fleets, her armies, her past renown and present spirit, she, has advantages during such a strife which no other country possesses, provided she does not throw them away by her own insanity. But this the proceedings of the Chartists and Repealers are precisely calculated to do. Had the London demonstration turned out successful, these prospects would have been utterly ruined, credit destroyed here as it has been in France, and the misery of the people augmented to a degree never, perhaps, before witnessed in modern Europe. Every Chartist meeting, by prolonging the period of distrust, by checking the return of confidence, by preventing the outlay of capital, postpones the restoration of prosperity by a certain period. As long as they continue, trade never can revive, industry must continue to languish, poverty to increase, suffering to be prolonged, woe to be augmented. What, then, is the guilt of those who, for their own selfish purposes, or to gratify a senseless vanity, prolong an agitation fraught with such disastrous consequences--retain the people, in whom they profess to be interested, steeped in such misery--and avert, when about to set in, the returning flood of prosperity to their country?

The French journalists, in the interest of revolution, are loud in their condemnation of the apathy, as they call it, of the great bulk of the English nation on this occasion, and express their astonishment that the Chartists, for some reason they cannot understand, shrank from a contest with the Government, under circumstances which gave them, as they think, every prospect of success. We will tell them the reason--which is not the less true, that it may not be altogether pleasing to their vanity: The English are major and they are minor; the English are men and they are schoolboys. We, too, have had our dreams of communism, but they were brought forward by Jack Cade in the days of Richard II.; we, too, have indulged in social aspirations, but it was in the days of the Fifth-Monarchy Men, and they ended in the despotism of Cromwell. It is very well for schoolboys and juvenile academicians to indulge in extravagant freaks suited to their years; but they do not become bearded veterans. When England became a man, she put away childish things. France, by the spoliations and destruction of the first Revolution, has lost the elements of freedom. But Germany yet possesses them; and if she does not abuse her advantages, in two hundred years she may possess the mingled freedom and stability which now constitute at once the glory and happiness of England. It requires that time to be free of the craft of liberty; there is no royal road to freedom any more than geometry. England has preceded other nations by two centuries in this glorious path; it would ill suit the masters to recede, and imitate the follies of such as are only becoming tyros in the attempt to follow it. Those who have long ago reached the summit, and know with what difficulty it was attained, can afford to smile at the young aspirants who invite them to descend and renew the toil of the ascent. Those who have spread political power with safety over a million of pacific electors diffused over a whole empire, have no occasion to imitate the example of those who would establish despotic power in the hands of two hundred thousand armed Janissaries of a single capital.

_Printed by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh._

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Transcriber's note:

Page 553: The transcriber has divided the large table into two sections.

Page 596: No closing quotation mark was provided in the original--'were "the immediate raising of the siege, and return of the army to the Continent; ...'

Page 636: "she used a word vernacularly employed to signify the stripping birds of their fathers." 'fathers' has been replaced with 'feathers'.

The chapter title "THE CAXTONS" has two consecutive chapters entitled