CHAPTER XXXVIII.

I remember one morning, when a boy, loitering by an old wall, to watch the operations of a garden spider, whose web seemed to be in great request. When I first stopped, she was engaged very quietly with a fly of the domestic species, whom she managed with ease and dignity. But just when she was most interested in that absorbing employment, came a couple of May-flies, and then a gnat, and then a blue-bottle,--all at different angles of the web. Never was a poor spider so distracted by her good fortune! She evidently did not know which godsend to take first. The aboriginal victim being released, she slid half-way towards the May-flies; then one of her eight eyes caught sight of the blue-bottle! and she shot off in that direction;--when the hum of the gnat again diverted her; and in the middle of this perplexity, pounce came a young wasp in a violent passion! Then the spider evidently lost her presence of mind; she became clean demented; and after standing, stupid and stock-still, in the middle of her meshes, for a minute or two, she ran off to her hole as fast as she could run, and left her guests to shift for themselves. I confess that I am somewhat in the dilemma of the attractive and amiable insect I have just described. I got on well enough while I had only my domestic fly to see after. But now that there is something fluttering at every end of my net, (and especially since the advent of that passionate young wasp, who is fuming and buzzing in the nearest corner!) I am fairly at a loss which I should first grapple with--and, alas! unlike the spider, I have no hole where I can hide myself, and let the web do the weaver's work. But I will imitate the spider as far as I can; and while the rest hum and struggle away their impatient, unnoticed hour, I will retreat into the inner labyrinth of my own life.

The illness of my uncle, and my renewed acquaintance with Vivian, had naturally sufficed to draw my thoughts from the rash and unpropitious love I had conceived for Fanny Trevanion. During the absence of the family from London, (and they stayed some time longer than had been expected,) I had leisure, however, to recall my father's touching history, and the moral it had so obviously preached to me; and I formed so many good resolutions, that it was with an untrembling hand that I welcomed Miss Trevanion at last to London, and with a firm heart that I avoided, as much as possible, the fatal charm of her society. The slow convalescence of my uncle gave me a just excuse for discontinuing our rides. What time Trevanion spared me, it was natural that I should spend with my family. I went to no balls or parties. I even absented myself from Trevanion's periodical dinners. Miss Trevanion at first rallied me on my seclusion with her usual lively malice. But I continued worthily to complete my martyrdom. I took care that no reproachful look at the gaiety that wrung my soul should betray my secret. Then Fanny seemed either hurt or disdainful, and avoided altogether entering her father's study; all at once, she changed her tactics, and was seized with a strange desire for knowledge, which brought her into the room to look for a book, or ask a question, ten times a-day. I was proof to all. But, to speak truth, I was profoundly wretched. Looking back now, I am dismayed at the remembrance of my own sufferings: my health became seriously affected; I dreaded alike the trial of the day and the anguish of the night. My only distractions were in my visits to Vivian, and my escape to the dear circle of home. And that home was my safeguard and preservative in that crisis of my life. Its atmosphere of unpretending honour and serene virtue strengthened all my resolutions; it braced me for my struggles against the strongest passion which youth admits, and counteracted the evil vapours of that air in which Vivian's envenomed spirit breathed and moved. Without the influence of such a home, if I had succeeded in the conduct that probity enjoined towards those in whose house I was a trusted guest, I do not think I could have resisted the contagion of that malign and morbid bitterness against fate and the world which love, thwarted by fortune, is too inclined of itself to conceive, and in the expression of which Vivian was not without the eloquence that belongs to earnestness, whether in truth or falsehood. But, somehow or other, I never left the little room that contained the grand suffering in the face of the veteran soldier, whose lip, often quivering with anguish, was never heard to murmur; and the tranquil wisdom which had succeeded my father's early trials, (trials like my own,) and the loving smile on my mother's tender face, and the innocent childhood of Blanche, (by which name the Elf had familiarised herself to us,) whom I already loved as a sister,--without feeling that those four walls contained enough tosweeten the world, had it been filled to its capacious brim with gall and hyssop.

Trevanion had been more than satisfied with Vivian's performance--he had been struck with it. For though the corrections in the mere phraseology had been very limited, they went beyond verbal amendments--they suggested such words as improved the thoughts; and, besides that notable correction of an arithmetical error, which Trevanion's mind was formed to over-appreciate, one or two brief annotations on the margin were boldly hazarded, prompting some stronger link in a chain of reasoning, or indicating the necessity for some further evidence in the assertion of a statement. And all this from the mere natural and naked logic of an acute mind, unaided by the smallest knowledge of the subject treated of! Trevanion threw quite enough work into Vivian's hands, and at a remuneration sufficiently liberal to realise my promise of an independence. And more than once he asked me to introduce to him my friend. But this I continued to elude--heaven knows, not from jealousy, but simply because I feared that Vivian's manner and way of talk would singularly displease one who detested presumption, and understood no eccentricities but his own.

Still Vivian, whose industry was of a strong wing, but only for short flights, had not enough to employ more than a few hours of his day, and I dreaded lest he should, from very idleness, fall back into old habits, and reseek old friendships. His cynical candour allowed that both were sufficiently disreputable to justify grave apprehensions of such a result; accordingly, I contrived to find leisure in my evenings to lessen his _ennui_, by accompanying him in rambles through the gas-lit streets, or occasionally, for an hour or so, to one of the theatres.

Vivian's first care, on finding himself rich enough, had been bestowed on his person; and those two faculties of observation and imitation which minds so ready always eminently possess, had enabled him to achieve that graceful neatness of costume peculiar to the English gentleman. For the first few days of his metamorphosis, traces indeed of a constitutional love of show, or vulgar companionship, were noticeable; but one by one they disappeared. First went a gaudy neckcloth, with collars turned down; then a pair of spurs vanished; and lastly, a diabolical instrument that he called a cane--but which, by means of a running bullet, could serve as a bludgeon at one end, and concealed a dagger in the other--subsided into the ordinary walking-stick adapted to our peaceable metropolis. A similar change, though in a less degree, gradually took place in his manner and conversation. He grew less abrupt in the one, and more calm, perhaps more cheerful, in the other. It was evident that he was not insensible to the elevated pleasure of providing for himself by praiseworthy exertion--of feeling for the first time that his intellect was of use to him, _creditably_. A new world, though still dim--seen through mist and fog, began to dawn upon him.

Such is the vanity of us poor mortals, that my interest in Vivian was probably increased, and my aversion to much in him materially softened, by observing that I had gained a sort of ascendency over his savage nature. When we had first met by the roadside, and afterwards conversed in the churchyard, the ascendency was certainly not on my side. But I now came from a larger sphere of society than that in which he had yet moved. I had seen and listened to the first men in England. What had then dazzled me only, now moved my pity. On the other hand, his active mind could not but observe the change in me; and, whether from envy or a better feeling, he was willing to learn from me how to eclipse me, and resume his earlier superiority--not to be superior chafed him. Thus he listened to me with docility when I pointed out the books which connected themselves with the various subjects incidental to the miscellaneous matters on which he was employed. Though he had less of the literary turn of mind than any one equally clever I have ever met, and had read little, considering the quantity of thought he had acquired, and the show he made of the few works (chiefly plays) with which he had voluntarily made himself familiar, he yet resolutely sate himself down to study; and though it was clearly against the grain, I augured the more favourably from tokens of a determination to do what was at the present irksome for a purpose in the future. Yet, whether I should have approved the purpose--had I thoroughly understood it--is another question! There were abysses, both in his past life and in his character, which I could not penetrate. There was in him both a reckless frankness and a vigilant reserve. His frankness was apparent in his talk on all matters immediately before us; in the utter absence of all effort to make himself seem better than he was. His reserve was equally shown in the ingenious evasion of every species of confidence that could admit me into such secrets of his life as he chose to conceal: where he had been born, reared, and educated; how he came to be thrown on his own resources; how he had contrived, how he had subsisted, were all matters on which he seemed to have taken an oath to Harpocrates, the god of silence. And yet he was full of anecdotes of what he had seen, of strange companions, whom he never named, but into whose society he had been thrown. And, to do him justice, I remarked that, though his precocious experience seemed to have been gathered from the holes and corners, the sewers and drains of life, and though he seemed wholly without dislike to dishonesty, and to regard virtue or vice with as serene an indifference as some grand poet who views them both merely as ministrants to his art, yet he never betrayed any positive breach of honesty in himself. He could laugh over the story of some ingenious fraud that he had witnessed, and seem insensible to its turpitude; but he spoke of it in the tone of an unreproving witness, not of an actual accomplice. As we grew more intimate, he felt gradually, however, that _pudor_, or instinctive shame, which the contact with minds habituated to the distinctions between wrong and right unconsciously produces,--and such stories ceased. He never but once mentioned his family, and that was in the following odd and abrupt manner,--

"Ah!" cried he one day, stopping suddenly before a print-shop, "how that reminds me of my dear, dear mother."

"Which?" said I eagerly, puzzled between an engraving of Raffaelle's "Madonna," and another of "The Brigand's Wife."

Vivian did not satisfy my curiosity, but drew me on in spite of my reluctance.

"You loved your mother, then?" said I, after a pause.

"Yes, as a whelp may a tigress."

"That's a strange comparison."

"Or a bull-dog may the prizefighter, his master! Do you like that better?"

"Not much; is it a comparison your mother would like?"

"Like!--she is dead!" said he, rather falteringly.

I pressed his arm closer to mine.

"I understand you," said he, with his cynic repellant smile. "But you do wrong to feel for my loss. I feel for it; but no one who cares for me should sympathise with my grief."

"Why?"

"Because my mother was not what the world would call a good woman. I did not love her the less for that--and now let us change the subject."

"Nay; since you have said so much, Vivian, let me coax you to say on. Is not your father living?"

"Is not the Monument standing?"

"I suppose so,--what of that?"

"Why, it matters very little to either of us; and my question answers yours!"

I could not get on after this, and I never did get on a step farther. I must own that, if Vivian did not impart his confidence liberally, neither did he seek confidence inquisitively from me. He listened with interest if I spoke of Trevanion, (for I told him frankly of my connexion with that personage, though you may be sure that I said nothing of Fanny,) and of the brilliant world that my residence with one so distinguished opened to me. But if ever, in the fulness of my heart, I began to speak of my parents, of my home, he evinced either so impertinent an _ennui_, or assumed so chilling a sneer, that I usually hurried way from him, as well as the subject, in indignant disgust. Once especially, when I asked him to let me introduce him to my father--a point on which I was really anxious, for I thought it impossible but that the devil within him would be softened by that contact--he said with his low, scornful laugh--

"My dear Caxton, when I was a child, I was so bored with 'Telemachus,' that, in order to endure it, I turned it into travesty."

"Well."

"Are you not afraid that the same wicked disposition might make a caricature of your Ulysses?"

I did not see Mr Vivian for three days after that speech; and I should not have seen him then, only we met, by accident, under the Colonnade of the Opera-House. Vivian was leaning against one of the columns, and watching the long procession which swept to the only temple in vogue that Art has retained in the English Babel. Coaches and chariots, blazoned with arms and coronets--cabriolets (the brougham had not then replaced them) of sober hue, but exquisite appointment, with gigantic horses and pigmy "tigers," dashed on and rolled off before him. Fair women and gay dresses, stars and ribbons--the rank and the beauty of the patrician world--passed him by. And I could not resist the compassion with which this lonely, friendless, eager, discontented spirit inspired me--gazing on that gorgeous existence in which it fancied itself formed to shine, with the ardour of desire and the despair of exclusion. By one glimpse of that dark countenance, I read what was passing within the yet darker heart. The emotion might not be amiable, nor the thoughts wise, yet, were they unnatural? I had experienced something of them--not at the sight of gay-dressed people, of wealth and idleness, pleasure and fashion; but when, at the doors of parliament, men who have won noble names, and whose word had weight on the destinies of glorious England, brushed heedlessly by to their grand arena; or when, amidst the holiday crowd of ignoble pomp, I had heard the murmur of fame buzz and gather round some lordly labourer in art or letters. That contrast between glory so near, and yet so far, and one's own obscurity, of course I had felt it--who has not? Alas, many a youth not fated to be a Themistocles, will yet feel that the trophies of a Miltiades will not suffer him to sleep! So I went up to Vivian, and laid my hand on his shoulder.

"Ah!" said he, more gently than usual, "I am glad to see you--and to apologise--I offended you the other day. But you would not get very gracious answers from souls in purgatory, if you talked to them of the happiness of heaven. Never speak to me about homes and fathers! Enough, I see you forgive me. Why are you not going to the opera? _You_ can!"

"And you too, if you so please. A ticket is shamefully dear, to be sure; still, if you are fond of music, it is a luxury you can afford."

"Oh, you flatter me if you fancy the prudence of saving withholds me! I did go the other night, but I shall not go again. Music!--when you go to the opera, is it for the music?"

"Only partially, I own: the lights, the scene, the pageant, attract me quite as much. But I do not think the opera a very profitable pleasure for either of us. For rich idle people, I dare say, it may be as innocent an amusement as any other, but I find it a sad enervator."

"And I just the reverse--a horrible, stimulant! Caxton, do you know that, ungracious as it will sound to you, I am growing impatient of this 'honourable independence!' What does it lead to?--board, clothes, and lodging,--can it ever bring me any thing more?"

"At first, Vivian, you limited your aspirations to kid gloves and a cabriolet--it has brought you the kid gloves already, by-and-by it will bring the cabriolet!"

"Our wishes grow by what they feed on. You live in the great world--you can have excitement if you please it--I want excitement, I want the world, I want room for my mind, man! Do you understand me?"

"Perfectly--and sympathise with you, my poor Vivian; but it will all come. Patience! as I preached to you while dawn rose so comfortless over the streets of London. You are not losing time--fill your mind, read, study, fit yourself for ambition. Why wish to fly till you have got your wings? Live in books now: after all, they are splendid palaces, and open to us all, rich and poor."

"Books, books!--ah, you are the son of a bookman! It is not by books that men get on in the world, and enjoy life in the meanwhile."

"I don't know that; but, my good fellow, you want to do both--get on in the world as fast as labour can, and enjoy life as pleasantly as indolence may. You want to live like the butterfly, and yet have all the honey of the bee; and, what is the very deuce of the whole, even as the butterfly, you ask every flower to grow up in a moment; and as a bee, the whole hive must be stored in a quarter of an hour! Patience, patience, patience!"

Vivian sighed a fierce sigh. "I suppose," said he, after an unquiet pause, "that the vagrant and the outlaw are strong in me; for I long to run back to my old existence, which was all action, and therefore allowed no thought."

While he thus said, we had wandered round the Colonnade, and were in that narrow passage that runs from Piccadilly into Charles Street, in which is situated the more private entrance to the opera; and close by the doors of that entrance, two or three young men were lounging. As Vivian ceased, the voice of one of these loungers came laughingly to our ears.

"Oh!" it said, apparently in answer to some question, "I have a much quicker way to fortune than that; I mean to marry an heiress!"

Vivian started, and looked at the speaker. He was a very good-looking fellow. Vivian continued to look at him, and deliberately, from head to foot; he then turned away with a satisfied and thoughtful smile.

"Certainly," said I gravely, (construing the smile,) "you are right there; you are even better-looking than that heiress-hunter!"

Vivian coloured; but before he could answer, one of the loungers, as the group recovered from the gay laugh which their companion's easy coxcombry had excited, said,--

"Then, by the way, if you want an heiress, here comes one of the greatest in England; but instead of being a younger son, with three good lives between you and an Irish peerage, one ought to be an earl at least to aspire to Fanny Trevanion!"

The name thrilled through me--I felt myself tremble--and, looking up, I saw Lady Ellinor and Miss Trevanion, as they hurried from their carriage towards the entrance of the opera. They both recognised me, and Fanny cried,--

"You here! How fortunate! You must see us into the box, even if you run away the moment after."

"But I am not dressed for the opera," said I, embarrassed.

"And why not?" asked Miss Trevanion; then, dropping her voice, she added, "Why do you desert us so wilfully?"--and, leaning her hand on my arm, I was drawn irresistibly into the lobby. The young loungers at the door made way for us, and eyed me, no doubt, with envy.

"Nay!" said I, affecting to laugh, as I saw Miss Trevanion waited for my reply. "You forget how little time I have for such amusements now,--and my uncle--"

"Oh, but mamma and I have been to see your uncle to-day, and he is nearly well--is he not, mamma? I cannot tell you how I like and admire him. He is just what I fancy a Douglas of the old day. But mamma is impatient. Well, you must dine with us to-morrow--promise!--not _adieu_, but _au revoir_," and Fanny glided to her mother's arm. Lady Ellinor, always kind and courteous to me, had good-naturedly lingered till this dialogue, or rather monologue, was over.

On returning to the passage I found Vivian walking to and fro; he had lighted his cigar, and was smoking energetically.

"So this great heiress," said he smiling, "who, as far as I could see--under her hood--seems no less fair than rich, is the daughter, I presume, of the Mr Trevanion whose effusions you so kindly submit to me. He is very rich, then? You never said so, yet I ought to have known it: but you see I know nothing of your _beau monde_--not even that Miss Trevanion is one of the greatest heiresses in England."

"Yes, Mr Trevanion is rich," said I, repressing a sigh--"very rich."

"And you are his secretary! My dear friend, you may well offer me patience, for a large stock of yours will, I hope, be superfluous to you."

"I don't understand you."

"Yet you heard that young gentleman as well as myself; and you are in the same house as the heiress."

"Vivian!"

"Well, what have I said so monstrous?"

"Pooh! since you refer to that young gentleman,--you heard, too, what his companion told him,--'one ought to be an earl, at least, to aspire to Fanny Trevanion!'"

"Tut! as well say that one ought to be a _millionnaire_ to aspire to a million!--yet I believe those who make millions generally begin with pence."

"That belief should be a comfort and encouragement to you, Vivian. And now, good-night,--I have much to do."

"Good-night, then," said Vivian, and we parted.

I made my way to Mr Trevanion's house, and to the study. There was a formidable arrear of business waiting for me, and I sate down to it at first resolutely; but, by degrees, I found my thoughts wandering from the eternal blue-books, and the pen slipped from my hand, in the midst of an extract from a Report on Sierra Leone. My pulse beat loud and quick; I was in that state of nervous fever which only emotion can occasion. The sweet voice of Fanny rang in my ears; her eyes, as I had last met them, unusually gentle--almost beseeching--gazed upon me wherever I turned; and then, as in mockery, I heard again those words,--"One ought to be an earl, at least, to aspire to"--Oh! did I aspire? Was I vain fool so frantic?--household traitor so consummate? No, no! Then what did I under the same roof?--why stay to imbibe this sweet poison, that was corroding the very springs of my life? At that self-question, which, had I been but a year or two older, I should have asked long before, a mortal terror seized me; the blood rushed from my heart, and left me cold--icy cold. To leave the house! leave Fanny!--never again to see those eyes--never to hear that voice!--better die of the sweet poison than of the desolate exile! I rose--I opened the windows--I walked to and fro the room: I could decide nothing--think of nothing; all my mind was in an uproar. With a violent effort at self-mastery, I approached the table again. I resolved to force myself to my task, if it were only to re-collect my faculties, and enable them to bear my own torture. I turned over the books impatiently, when, lo! buried amongst them, what met my eye--archly, yet reproachfully? the face of Fanny herself! Her miniature was there. It had been, I knew, taken a few days before, by a young artist whom Trevanion patronised. I suppose he had carried it into his study to examine it, and so left it there carelessly. The painter had seized her peculiar expression--her ineffable smile--so charming, so malicious; even her favourite posture,--the small head turned over the rounded Hebe-like shoulder--the eye glancing up from under the hair. I know not what change in my madness came over me; but I sank on my knees, and, kissing the miniature again and again, burst into tears. Such tears! I did not hear the door open--I did not see the shadow steal over the floor; a light hand rested on my shoulder, trembling as it rested. I started--Fanny herself was bending over me!

"What is the matter?" she asked tenderly. "What has happened?--your uncle--your family--all well? Why are you weeping?"

I could not answer; but I kept my hands clasped over the miniature, that she might not see what they contained.

"Will you not answer? Am I not your friend?--almost your sister? Come, shall I call mamma?"

"Yes--yes; go--go."

"No, I will not go yet. What have you there?--what are you hiding?"

And innocently, and sister-like, those hands took mine; and so--and so--the picture became visible! There was a dead silence. I looked up through my tears. Fanny had recoiled some steps, and her cheek was very flushed, her eyes downcast. I felt as if I had committed a crime--as, if dishonour clung to me; and yet I repressed--yes, thank Heaven! I repressed the cry that swelled from my heart, that rushed to my lips--"Pity me, for I love you!" I repressed it, and only a groan escaped me--the wail of my lost happiness! Then, rising, I laid the miniature on the table, and said, in a voice that I believe was firm--

"Miss Trevanion, you _have_ been as kind as a sister to me, and therefore I was bidding a brother's farewell to your likeness; it _is_ so like you--this!"

"Farewell!" echoed Fanny, still not looking up.

"Farewell--_sister_! There--I have boldly said the word; for--for"--I hurried to the door, and, there turning, added, with what I meant to be a smile--"for they say at home that I--I am not well; too much for me this; you know mothers will be foolish; and--and--I am to speak to your father to-morrow; and--good-night--God bless you, Miss Trevanion!"

REPUBLICAN FIRST-FRUITS.[10]

[10] _Jérome Paturot à la Recherche de la Meilleure des Républiques._ Par LOUIS REYBAUD. Volumes 1 to 3. Paris: 1848.

_Monsieur Bonardin, ou les Agrémens de la République--Proverbe en plusieurs Décades._ Paris: 1848.

When reviewing, in last month's Magazine, the accumulated French novels of the summer, we reserved two, partly on account of incompleteness and tardy arrival, but chiefly as worthy of a separate notice. They belong to a branch of literature not much cultivated in France of late years, but which revives and flourishes by favour of recent convulsions, and of the present feverish political atmosphere of the country. Political satire, even in the gay disguise of fiction, was not quite a safe venture during the reign of Louis Philippe the king. Bearing in mind certain arbitrary infractions of the liberty of the press, it might well have proved a dangerous one under the rule of Cavaignac the dictator. Nevertheless, here are two books of sharp jests, that must be caustic to the cuticle of the heroes and votaries of the republican regime. In style different, their aim is identical: it is nothing less than an exposure of the faults, follies, and deceptions of the French republic. One is comedy, the other broad farce; whilst the latter plunges into burlesque, the former rarely oversteps the limits of polished satire, and often but faithfully depicts--with altered names, but with scarcely a touch of caricature--scenes and personages in the great serio-comic drama enacting in France since February last. There can be no dispute as to the comparative merits of the books, nor, indeed, can a comparison be instituted between them. _Jérome Paturot_ has, in some parts, almost the weight of history, and it would not be surprising to see it hereafter so referred to. It is the work of a man of acknowledged talent, an esteemed and experienced writer, a member of the legislative chamber both before and since the expulsion of the King of the French. If occasionally rather diffuse, M. Louis Reybaud is always witty and shrewd: he is an acute observer; and, to crown our praise, he is evidently of stanch Tory principles. There is a strong good sense, a calm contempt of cant and of pseudo-liberalism, a stripping, whipping, and pickling of humbug, in his _Jérome Paturot_, at any time agreeable to behold, but peculiarly refreshing just now, by its contrast with the folly, hypocrisy, and fanaticism of many of his countrymen. We are glad to find there still are Frenchmen capable of thinking and writing so soundly and sensibly--a fact which, with every disposition to judge the nation favourably, recent events have almost made us doubt. "_Jérome Paturot in quest of the best possible Republic_" is more than witty, spirited, and amusing. Its strong good sense and sledge-hammer truths may and must influence, in a right direction, the minds of many of its French readers. Should any of these be so obtuse as not fully to appreciate Jérome's sly wit and pungent epigrams, to them _Monsieur Bonardin_ addresses himself, secure of comprehension: him every one will understand. The dramatised narrative of his misadventures, commencing on the morrow of the republic's proclamation, and comprised in thirteen decades, was doubtless suggested by the perusal of _Paturot_, and this the anonymous author tacitly acknowledges, rather than attempts to conceal. He chooses his hero in the same respectable trade to which Jérome devoted his time and industry, when the ambitious cravings of his restless youth had subsided, and before increasing wealth, the epaulets of a captain of nationals, and the glitter of a citizen-king's court, turned him from the paths of commerce, to climb an eminence whence he finally got a fall. Paturot and Bonardin are both _bonnetiers_, or hosiers--venders of unpoetical white nightcaps, pointed and tasselled, and of other wares woven of cotton. Either on account of the prosaic associations suggested by these useful manufactures, or for some other reason, to us unknown, the _bonnetier_ is a favourite character with French writers when they wish to portray a good, simple-hearted, steady-going, pusillanimous Parisian burgess. Bonardin is all this: a bachelor and an epicure, he leads a monotonous but happy existence in the society of Babet and Criquet, his housekeeper and clerk; loves his dinner, his bed, and his ease; and, although a corporal in the national guard, has attained the mature age of fifty-five in profound ignorance of the process of loading and firing a musket. In short, he is the last man in the world to make or meddle with the revolution, whose passive victim, from the mere fact of his lot being cast in Paris, he unfortunately becomes. Paturot is another sort of character. Originally simple enough, his wit has been sharpened by deceptions and reverses. Although to many of our readers M. Reybaud's former works[11] are already well known, we briefly sketch, for the use of those who have not met with them, the career of Jérome Paturot previously to the advent of the republic. Aspiring, as a young man, to higher occupations than the sale of cottons, he refused a partnership with his uncle, a thriving hosier, to dabble in literature, art, journalism, and various unlucky speculations. Reclaimed at last, he settled down to stockings; married Malvina, a warm-hearted, ready-witted, high-spirited grisette, who had long shared his precarious fortunes; throve apace, went to court, was elected deputy, and at last, by extravagance and mismanagement, found himself ruined, and was fain to retire into a provincial nook, to vegetate upon the wretched salary of a petty government appointment. Here, soured by misfortune, he grumbled himself into republicanism. But when the republic came, he, the only pure and genuine "republican of the eve" in the town, was elbowed aside by mushroom "republicans of the morrow," and deprived of his place; whereupon his wife sent him to Paris, to recover it or get a better one, and followed him herself, after bringing about, by an active canvass and clever manœuvres, the election to the National Assembly of one Simon--an honest, ignorant miller, with a strong arm, a thick head, and a sonorous voice--at whose house the Paturots had occasionally paused for refreshment in their country walks, and through whom Malvina reckons on advancing her husband's interests, and on commanding a vote in the Chambers.

[11] Mill's _Principles of Political Economy_, vol. i. p. 393.

At Paris, Paturot meets an old friend, Oscar, an artist, remarkable for a large beard and a small talent, and for a vanity that nothing can intimidate. In his society, and in the intervals of his place-hunting--to all appearance a fruitless chase--Jérome begins a course of "Life under the Republic," his rambles and adventures serving as pegs whereon to hang cutting satire of the anomalies and absurdities of the new order of things. At first he is greatly struck by the gay aspect of the town.

"Paris was in continual festival--its busy life exchanged for complete idleness. Eager for amusement, the crowd quitted the workshop, to pick and choose amongst the pastimes offered them. These were abundant; archery, games at the ring, lotteries in the open air--a perpetual fair. It seemed a new Cocaigne, and a people exempt from all cares for the future. Happy shepherds! fortunate sheep! Theological divertisements for those; for these a free field and plenteous pasture. Thus were the parts distributed in this eclogue worthy of Gessner. Now and then, it is true, there were a few more fireworks than were ordered, and some of the illuminations were not quite spontaneous; but these were imperceptible blemishes in a glorious picture. In pursuit of an idea, I was tempted to think I had found it realised on my path without trouble or effort, and as a gift of circumstances.

"Nevertheless I had my doubts, my fears, that this apparent joy was a mask to mysterious sufferings. In these joyous cries and bursts of enthusiasm, there was a something harsh and artificial, which roused my suspicions. At the bottom of this feverish activity, I sought labour, serious labour--the health of the soul and the bread of the body--and I found it not. These men, so ardent in their rejoicings, daily borrowed from the commonwealth a portion of its substance, giving nothing in return. Could this last? Did they themselves think it could? The inquiry was worth making. I addressed myself to persons of all ranks and classes. The problem was simple enough. If the republic was really the joy and pride of France, it of course insured the happiness of individuals."

The result of Jérome's inquiries was that the joy was on the surface, not in the heart. The spectacle he had before him was the pitiable one of a people getting drunk upon its own acclamations, raising a senseless clamour to drown the fiend of misery, which approached their door with swift and certain step. Already the bony foot of the monster was on many a threshhold. Paturot questioned a banker. "Alas!" was the reply,--"see you not what occurs? Twenty first-class banking-houses unable to meet their engagements; others will follow. Those who continue to pay decline business and announce their winding up. Before two months there will be no cashing a bill in all Paris. Every body is suspected--you, I, the bank, the treasury. Credit is lost, confidence extinguished." This was discouraging; but Jérome, not satisfied with one testimony, passed on to a manufacturer. "Manufactures!" said this man, a republican of the very first water--"you ask the state of manufactures, citizen! you might as well ask after a dead man's health. I employed two thousand workmen; now I employ one hundred, and only for humanity's sake do I keep them. Our country asked us to make her a present of two hours' work a-day. We sacrificed our interest to a principle, and did so. But two hours' work is a loss of ten per cent, and as my average gain was only five, you understand I am obliged to stop my looms. If the public would pay a better price for our stuffs, well and good; but there seems little chance of that. Poor customers, citizen,--a parcel of ruined men. For half-nothing I would be off to America, with my foremen and my patents." The fundholder's account of the matter was no better. "Buy my stock?" said he to his interrogator--"shall have it cheap. My fives cost me 122, and my threes 84: I had confidence, sir--the word explains every thing. Now the threes are at 34, and the fives at 50. I have railway shares of all the lines--Orleans, North, Rouen, &c. God knows the hard cash I paid for them! To-day they are worth the paper: here they are, blue, green, and red. I would as soon have shares in the Mississippi. I had treasury bonds--cash lent, payable at will; I reckoned on it. Door shut. Come another day, my good man, and we will see what we can do. If you are in a hurry, go on 'Change. You will get 500 francs for 1000." Heart-sick, Paturot descended the social scale, but the song was every where the same. "I fought in July and in February," said the shopkeeper; "I helped to take the Louvre and the Tuileries; I was seen upon the barricades, musket in hand. What is my reward? a shop full of goods, and an empty till. For two months past, not a purchaser. Debtors will not pay, and creditors will be paid." As a last forlorn hope, Jérome accosted an artisan. "You want to know my opinion, citizen? You shall have it, in two words. The thing is a failure, and must be done over again. 'Lend a hand to the Revolution,' they said to us, 'and this time you shall not be forgotten.' Very good; word passed, bargain accepted. In a turn of the hand, the thing is done. Here are your goods, where's your money? There the difficulty began. 'Let us organise labour,' they exclaimed at the Luxembourg. Very well; organise, citizens--take your time. The workman has his savings, he will wait. Three days, four days, pass in speeches, embraces, mutual congratulations. The workman has deputed comrades who sit upon the benches of the peers; it is always an honour, if it does not fill the belly. He takes patience, and forgets himself for the general good, until a voice is heard from the Luxembourg saying, 'We are going to try to organise labour.' The deuce, says the workman; the first day they organise, and now they try to organise; that is not like progress. Meanwhile, he is on the street, more pinched than ever. Little by little his money goes, and his credit too. He returns to his workshop; door shut, nothing doing. He tries another; same answer. Whilst they 'tried to organise,' work had disappeared. I am wrong--nominal work was still to be had--alms in the guise of labour. Sooner break my arm than have recourse to it."

The reader will recognise in these passages exact statements of facts. The artisan's last reference is, of course, to the national workshops, whither we shall presently accompany M. Reybaud's hero. The disease of the social body, of which Paturot's inquiries gave him warning, soon became too prevalent for concealment; and, as usual in such cases, a host of quacks started up, puffing their panaceas. This, however, was not till the self-appointed, but more regular physicians of the Republic had made desperate attempts at a cure. Attempts and quackeries were alike recorded in the journals of the day. M. Reybaud writes a chronicle, and deserves our gratitude for its lucid and pointed style. The first prescription of the lawful practitioner was a national loan, to be subscribed at par. On reflection, however, the drug was thought too expensive, the electuary did not advance beyond the state of a project, and, of course, the patient was no better. The next remedy was a wooden one, but none the worse for that. "It was resolved to apply to the diseased organs a portion of the crown-forests, millions of ash and birch trees--antiquated elms, and historical limes--all the vegetable riches of the country! What treasury would not be saved at this price? The responsible doctor could not doubt success; he hugged himself for the bright idea. Well! heaven, jealous of his genius, frustrated his combinations. Unfortunately, the forests could not be applied to the patient's relief in their natural state. The ash-trees positively refused to enter the public cash-box in the form of an essence; the birches were equally obstinate, the elms no less so. It was necessary to transmute them into metal, and there was the difficulty. With time, the thing might have been done; but what avails distant succour to a dying man?" Other plans were then suggested; decree followed decree with startling rapidity, but without avail; distress gained ground, and the crisis reached its height. Entire streets closed their shops and counting-houses. Time-honoured names found their way into the gazette; some of their owners nobly sustaining the shock, others yielding to despair and rushing to suicide. It was a frightful and unexpected scene of ruin, which surprised the financial world in the midst of the abuse of credit, and of a fever of speculation.

"How arrest the evil? What dyke oppose to this growing devastation? There was no lack of saviours--they swarmed; nor of miraculous plans--the walls were covered with them. Every day hundreds of individuals presented themselves, offering to contract with the country for a supply of felicity. In their eyes, all this misfortune was but a mistake; to remedy it they had sure balsams and magic charms. It was a new profession that suddenly started up, that of saviour of the country, with or without government guarantee."

The quacks were the leaders of the clubs, several of which were visited by Oscar and Paturot; and Jérome was surprised to find how little freedom of discussion was allowed amongst men professing universal equality. Contradiction to the great orator of the hour and place was usually a signal for the expulsion of the rash offender, unless the follower of Fourier interposed, and expressed his willingness to enter the lists of argument. Cabet and the Icarians are capitally shown up. At the end of the discussion, which more resembled a lecture, the pontiff of the community produced a packet of letters, received from the colony where his Utopian schemes were to be carried out, and read extracts to his admiring auditors, interlarding them with reflections of his own. "Father," the despatch began, "all goes well; fraternity intoxicates us. We cannot sleep at night for the mosquitoes; but, like every thing else, these insects are in common: that thought consoles us."

'Poor dear children!'

"We have been visited by a great drought; it was common to us all. Grass failed for the flocks, and meat for man. But with fraternity all is light--even our diet. Yesterday morning we went to draw water from the Tair. The river was dry; we got nothing but locusts."

'Divine! pastoral! like a page of the Bible.'

"To-day a tribe of Sioux paid us a neighbourly visit. We invited them to join our brotherhood. They scalped two of our brethren. Father, this concerns us greatly. Two scalped and the others not. Where is the equality? They should have scalped us all."

'Touching scruple!'

"You are expected here with the liveliest impatience, and will be received with open arms. We run short of shirts; hasten to send us some, or we shall find ourselves in the condition of a primitive people. Father, bless your children.

"THE COLONY OF THE TAIR."

* * * * *

There is more caricature in this than M. Reybaud generally permits himself. The reading of the despatch from the communist pioneers was followed by a collection, whose announcement nearly cleared the room, and whose result was pitifully small, the enthusiasm of the assembly having expired upon the road from the lips to the pocket. Jérome departed in disgust. He was scarcely better pleased at the next club he visited, whose orator harped perpetually upon one string, whence it was impossible to detach him. "Let us associate all men's capital, labour, and talent," said he emphatically. "It is the salvation and reconciliation of all interests." Jérome, who had always disliked "those sententious aphorisms which resemble pompous signs before empty shops," could not forbear an interruption, and requested the speaker to explain his words. But it was impossible to drag the socialist from his formula. His reply was a repetition of the same nonsense in other words. "Do what I would, I could not detach him from these common-place and pompous generalities. A controversy ensued, and I tried to bring it round to the boreal crown and the cardinal aromas. He refused to follow; and at last, finding himself hard pressed, he made me the offer of a ministry of progress. If there had been no door, I certainly should have jumped out of window." After a visit to Louis Blanc at the Luxembourg, Paturot repaired to the national workshops, whose administration occupied the park and pavilions of Monceaux.

"The following problem being given:--How to realise the least possible work with the greatest possible number of workmen;

"And supposing it is desired to discover the institution, existing or to exist, which shall most completely fulfil the end proposed;

"The solution will necessarily be--

THE NATIONAL WORKSHOP.

"Never perhaps did a fact of this nature present itself, especially with such proportions. Before us, it had occurred to no one to confound alms with work. Nobody ever thought of cloaking alms with the appearance of a useless labour. In a few individual cases of misery, this way of concealing the donor's hand may leave some illusion to him who receives; but the assistance afforded by the public treasury to an entire army, to a hundred thousand men, admits of no doubt as to its nature. It is nothing more or less than English pauperism in the rudimental state."

Jérome had heard Oscar speak of these national workshops, one of whose brigades contained, according to the artist's account, the flower of Parisian society--five sculptors, twelve painters, and a whole company of authors. One of the sculptors had fixed his own task at twenty-five pebbles a-day. Monday he carried them from right to left; on Tuesday from left to right, and so on. The twenty-five pebbles had already brought him in seventy-five francs, three francs a pebble, and in time he hoped to get them up to a napoleon a-piece. Each workman received two francs a-day when employed; one franc when idle. Eight francs a-week were guaranteed to him, at work or not. Paturot, who doubted Master Oscar's details, resolved to use his own eyes, and set out for Monceaux. The gates were besieged by discontented workmen, clamorous to see the director, who was in no haste to show himself. Work was the cry, on account of the additional franc gained by a day of nominal labour. And work there was none for three-fourths of the sixty thousand men (subsequently 120,000) then upon the roll of the national workshops. And even when the director, to save the park gates from destruction, made his appearance and heard their complaints, they still were hard to please. They would find terrace-making at the Champ de Mars:--they were tired of that. They might break stones at Asnières;--many thanks; it spoiled their hands. Would they condescend to plant early potatoes in the fields of St Maur? They should have the eating of them when ripe. The offer was treated with contempt. At last they were suited. A nurseryman at Ville d'Avray was to deliver a lot of saplings to plant upon the Boulevards, in lieu of those trees planted after the revolution of 1830, which just began to afford an appearance of shade when they were swept away by that of 1848. It was a pleasant walk to Ville d'Avray, across the Bois de Boulogne and by St Cloud; and the national workmen set out, two hundred and fifty in number. The nurseryman was astounded at their arrival. He had already hired two carts, for fifteen francs, to convey the two hundred and fifty acacias, which were carefully packed in mould and matting. Torn from their envelopes, they were shouldered by the workmen. On the way back to Paris, rain came on, and at Sevres a halt was called: the trees were piled by the roadside, and the bearers crowded the wine-houses. Paturot and Oscar, who had accompanied them on their walk, entered the tavern patronised by Comtois and Percheron, in whom M. Reybaud typifies the Parisian populace. Comtois was a giant, strong as a horse, and gentle as a lamb; Percheron, weaker of arm, was stronger of head, and far more glib of tongue. "The one represented the strength and goodness of the people, the other its turbulence and causticity." One was resistance, the other restless progress. These two men, who thereafter frequently figure in the book, attracted Paturot's particular attention. A few bottles of wine won their hearts; they proposed his health, and offered to elect him deputy at the next election. Speeches followed, and bitter complaints of a government that neglected the workman. Percheron was then called upon for a song, and gave parodies of the _Marseillaise_ and of the _Mourir pour la Patrie_, which he converted into _Nourris par la Patrie_. When he came to the last couplet of the _Marseillaise_, his comrades called out for the flag accompaniment.

"'As at the _Français_, Percheron! as at the _Français_!

"'Really! What epicures! Nothing but the best will serve you, it seems. Well, my boys, you shall be satisfied.'

"At the same time he arranged a couple of napkins in the fashion of a flag, draping himself with them picturesquely; then, rolling his eyes in their orbits, he threw himself on his knees, and assumed the airs of a Pythoness who has diligently studied posture before her mirror."

The parodies, rich in thieves' slang, at an end, and the bottles empty, the grateful pensioners of the national workshops resumed their march, cutting practical jokes, and cudgel-playing with the acacias, which were considerably deteriorated by the proceeding. "Such," says Jérome Paturot, "was the end of this memorable day, during which Oscar and myself were enabled to appreciate a national workshop and the services it rendered. The account was easily made up. Two hundred and fifty men had carried two hundred and fifty saplings. Two francs for each man's day's work, and three francs for each acacia, made five hundred francs on the one hand, and seven hundred and fifty on the other. Total cost, twelve hundred and fifty francs. Not one of the plants survived the consequences of the breakfast, notwithstanding which there was the expense of planting them, and afterwards that of digging them up. Double work, double charges. Such were the national workshops; such the profits of the institution."

The allusion in the tavern-scene to Mademoiselle Rachel is not the only cut administered by M. Reybaud to the tragedy-queen of the French republican stage.

Jérome and Oscar, strolling one evening down the Rue Richelieu, found a crowd at the theatre doors. The Provisional Government treated the people to the play. The whole mass of tickets was divided amongst the twelve mayors of Paris, who distributed them in their _arrondissements_. But somehow or other a considerable number had got into the hands of the ticket merchants, and for twenty francs Paturot and his companion obtained a couple of stalls. The play over, the hour of the _Marseillaise_ arrived.

"The tragedian approached the foot-lamps, a tricoloured flag in her hand. Her manner of singing the republican hymn at once carried away and revolted the hearer. It was like the roar of the lioness urging her male to the combat. The tone was not of our period; its energy and ferocity had no sufficient motive. It breathed vengeance--where was the injury to revenge? conquest--and where the territory to conquer? Even as an artistical study, the effect should have been more measured, more restrained. That effect was nevertheless great, and was felt by every one in the theatre. Under the flash of that glance and the power of that voice, a sort of low shuddering ran along the benches, and was broken only by a universal acclamation. The enthusiasm sustained itself thus to the last couplet, which was of itself a scene and a _tableau_."

The song over, a workman in a blouse leaped upon the stage, bent his knee before the actress, and presented her with a bouquet of choice flowers and a paper. The manager, at the demand of the audience, read the latter aloud. It was the following acrostic in honour of Rachel:--

R eine de l'empire magique, A vous ce don de l'ouvrier; C harmez-nous par votre art magique, H éroïne au royal cimier, E t chantez d'un accent guerrier L' hymne ardent de la république.

This apropos piece of gallantry drew down thunders of applause, to which the members of the Provisional Government there present contributed their share. But Paturot had recognised, to his great surprise, in the bouquet-bearer, the smart young scamp of whom he had purchased his admission, and whom he had noticed as being evidently a leading character amongst the not very reputable fraternity of ticket-mongers. Curious to penetrate the secret of his sudden metamorphosis, he followed him, and overheard his conversation with his colleagues. The bouquet had cost fifty francs, the acrostic five, flowers of literature being cheaper under the republic than those of the hothouse. Mitouflet's comrades are bewildered by his extravagance, until he divulges the secret that--government pays. "Happy nation!" exclaims Jérome, "whom a benevolent government finds in bread and tragedies! What more can it desire?"

No class of society escapes M. Reybaud's satire. Under the title of "The Victims of Events," he devotes a chapter to the authors, artists, and actors whom the revolution has deprived of bread. They deserve their fate, he maintains; they have abandoned the true for the worship of false gods, they have dealt in maleficent philters instead of wholesome medicines; they have used their power to mislead and corrupt, not to guide and rightly direct, those who pinned their faith on their performances. They were mischievous quacks, not conscientious physicians. The literary sufferers are the first whom he exhibits. "Some employed history as a die, and struck with it a coin of very base metal." Take that, M. Dumas. "Others fomented violent instincts in the bosom of the masses, and invited them to sacrilegious revolts, exhibiting only the impurities of civilisation, and conducting the people to anger by the road of disgust." This, we need hardly say, is levelled at the Sue school. But the names of these men, one day so loud in the ears of the multitude, the next were drowned in the tumult of revolutions. "To fill the cup of bitterness to the brim, it was not honour alone that remained on this calamitous field of battle. The bank-notes shared the same fate. Who would have predicted this, in those opulent days, when a piece of gold was found at the end of every line, like the natural product of a seemingly inexhaustible mine? Who would have foretold it in those hours of success, amidst the intoxications of luxury, and in the indulgence of a thousand caprices worthy an Eastern prince? Every road was then strewed with emeralds, every path covered with rubies. There was no style of living that Imagination, with its fairy fingers, could not sustain. She gave her favourites every thing--coaches and lackeys, open house, and a prince's retinue. How remote is that happy time! What a falling off in that Asiatic existence! Where are the emeralds? where the rubies? The bank-note is a figment; gold a chimera. Money and glory have gone down into the same tomb.... But the man of style was not easy to vanquish. He braved neglect, and, deeming himself a necessary element in the world's economy, he set to work again--only, following the example of the modern divinities, he took care to transform himself. Hitherto, politics had appeared to him of secondary importance, and he had abandoned them to colourists of an inferior grade. Events had rendered them worthy of the great pens of the age. 'Aha!' said the man of style--'Aha! they force us to it: very well, they shall see. We lived quietly in the sanctuary of art, asking but sequins and perfumes of the external world. Provided the sherbet was cool and the amber bright, what cared we for the rest? But now they besiege us in our favourite asylum. Distress is at the door, pressing and menacing. To arms, then, to institute a new system of politics.' And the man of style entered the arena of politics, ferula in hand, and spur on heel." But only to encounter a lamentable break-down. It is pretty evident whom M. Reybaud had in view when making this sketch, here greatly abridged, but which is very exact and amusing in its details, and must be particularly gratifying to Alexander Dumas. He then takes up the painters, and exposes the system of mutual puffing and hired criticism. The comedian has his turn: "But lately he reigned and laid down the law. Each note of his voice was a priceless treasure; his gestures were current coin. For him the bank had not enough notes, nor fame enough trumpets. The mob crowded round him, when he walked abroad, as round a prince of the blood. Vienna and Petersburg disputed him; the two worlds were his domain. How believe that such an idol should one day be hurled from his pedestal? Nevertheless it came to pass. He beheld vacant benches and an empty treasury. He had been improvident, and misery sat down by his hearth. Perhaps he then remembered how he had defied fate, and squandered wealth; how he had abused every thing--his health and his talent, the public and himself. Had he not given into that vein of falsehood and monstrosity, which made the theatre a school of perversity, and art an instrument of disorder? Had he not degraded the stage by creakings of snuff-boxes and misplaced hiccups? Had he not ridiculed, in a celebrated type, instincts the most sacred and worthy of respect? Such excesses escape not punishment." There is much truth in this. But is it a fact, that Frederick Lemaitre (here evidently selected as the type of his profession) has thus suddenly lost his popularity and sunk into poverty? The last time we saw his name in a French theatrical feuilleton, his successful appearance in a new piece was recorded. Has he not also, since the revolution, drawn crowds to witness his performance of Robert Macaire, the piece to which M. Reybaud more particularly alludes, and which was prohibited under the monarchy, because Lemaitre, in acting the part of the swindler Robert, used to make himself up to resemble Louis Philippe, and introduced unpleasant hits at the King of the French? There is no question, however, that Lemaitre is an instance of the prostitution of great talents. With more respect for himself and for the public, he might have aspired to a high place in the profession, with one of whose lower walks he has all his life remained contented.

Meanwhile, secret hands were at work preparing a movement, of which the national workshop was to be the chief instrument. One morning, when stone-breaking at the Porte Maillot, Percheron took Comtois aside to inform him that the clubs had decided on an outbreak. Comtois does not at first relish the idea, and is anxious to return to his hammer and pebbles, but Percheron, who, by reason of his superior intelligence, is one of six workmen to whom the plan has been communicated, bewilders the simple giant by the sunny prospects he exposes. This time it is the people who will reap the profits of the revolution. No more kid gloves and varnished boots; the blouse will be the passport to the good things of this life. No more wages. All Frenchmen are to be partners. An immense association; real equality; the workman well dressed, well fed, well housed, and always with twenty-five francs in his pocket, guaranteed by the state. The _bourgeois_, the rich man, is to be entirely abolished. Under pain of death, no one is to have more than a hundred francs in his possession. Costly furniture, plate, carriages, liveries, fine houses, jewellery, statues, pictures--all are to be suppressed. Poor stupid Comtois, venturing to inquire what will become of servants, jewellers, coach-makers, &c., &c., is forthwith snubbed by his smarter comrade. "They will do something else; there is to be work for every body." The communists have found an apt scholar in Percheron. Comtois reflects, admits they can always break stones, and agrees to place himself, upon the following Monday, at the orders of the conspirators. Upon that day (the famous 15th May) the fate of the Poles is to be discussed in the National Assembly; and, under colour of a demonstration in their favour, a clean sweep is to be made of the representatives of the people.

There had been so much talk about this debate, that Madame Paturot resolved to witness it, and by great exertions she obtained a ticket. She could no longer reckon on Simon for admission, the ungrateful miller having passed over to the enemy, and yielded himself captive to the fleshpots and flatteries of the "Provisional." Jérome, who had a presentiment of danger, urged her not to go, the more so as she would have to go alone, for he could get no order. But the exgrisette, all courage and confidence, laughed at the notion of danger, despised caution, and betook herself to the Chamber. Paturot and Oscar sauntered on the Boulevards. Nothing indicated a disturbance, until they reached the Porte St Denis. There the scene changed as suddenly as at shifter's whistle. A multitude of heads covered the Boulevard, green branches forming above them an undulating canopy of verdure. The throng moved steadily in one direction: songs and cries broke from its bosom. The name of Poland was predominant. Oscar caught the infection and repeated the cry, "_Vive la Pologne!_" In vain Paturot remonstrated. The artist's beard bristled with excitement. He had passed seven years of his childhood in the same room with a portrait of Poniatowski taking his famous leap into the Elster. After that, would Jérome have him forget Poland? Forbid it, heaven! And "_Vive la Pologne!_" "The column advanced, with its leafy trophies--the clubs, the national workshops, (Comtois and Percheron in the van,) with flags and banners, cards in their hatbands, and other rallying signs. There was a certain degree of order. Here and there, at street corners, were seen the great leaders of the manifestation, presidents of clubs, or persons to whom captivity had given celebrity, encouraging their men by word and gesture, now by a short speech, or apropos cheer, then by a shake of the hand. Oscar knew all these heroes of revolt, these princes of the prison." And knowing them, the impetuous artist was at least convinced that Poland was only the pretext. He ceased his ill-advised hurras, and resumed the part of a mere observer. As the column advanced, the shops shut. The air was full of menacing sounds. Thousands of Poles and Italians, bearing the banners of their respective countries, joined the mob. Uniforms abounded, officers' epaulets were not rare: even those corps charged with the police of the city contributed their quota to the concourse. The multitude pressed forward with the confidence of people who dispose of an empire. The chiefs of the insurrection were not men to enter the field unadvisedly, and their countenances betrayed a consciousness of strength. Their passage afforded evidence of a vast complicity. They advanced, without obstacle or impediment, even to the very doors of the Assembly. A few bayonets upon the bridge leading to the palace were overthrown in an instant, and the building was forthwith surrounded by furious groups. The gates were burst by Comtois and his companions: the Assembly was invaded. "A shameful page in our history!" exclaims M. Reybaud. "A sad and fatal commencement! Time itself cannot efface the stain. Upon the roll of history will remain recorded the fact, worthy of a barbarian horde, that, during three hours, an Assembly, chosen by the voices of the whole nation, was left exposed, defenceless, to the outrages of turbulent scholars, and to the contact of impure adventurers."

Uneasy about his wife, Jérome Paturot tried to enter the house, but one of the insurgents replaced the usual guardian of the gate, and demanded the card of his club. No admission without proof of his belonging to the Droits de l'Homme, or the Conservatory, or the Palais National. So Jerome waited outside. Suddenly a cry was raised, "To the Hotel de Ville!" and there was an instant rush in that direction. Oscar, who hitherto had watched for Malvina at one entrance of the Chamber, whilst his friend stood sentry at the other, could resist no longer. He had a relapse of the revolutionary vertigo.

"To the Hotel de Ville!" shouted the mob.

"Hurra for the Hotel de Ville!" repeated Oscar. "It is not exactly the way to the land of the Jagellons; but what matter? What a curious people! Nothing will serve them but to take the Hotel de Ville every week."

And away went Oscar to share in the capture. The rescue had come, and the mob was expelled from the Chamber. Jérome, who could see nothing of Malvina, returned to his lodgings in great alarm. After a while a porter brings him a letter. It is from Madame Paturot, giving, in the well-known _grisette_-dialect, an account of her adventures, written down in the interval between the expulsion of the rioters and the resumption of the sitting. It is about ten times as long as could be written in the time, but it is necessary to narrate what passed within the Chamber, as well as what occurred without; and no one is more capable than Malvina. In her picturesque and popular style, she gives a graphic bulletin of the strange events she has witnessed. The recital acquires additional interest, when we remember that M. Reybaud is a member of the Assembly, and was doubtless present at the scene described. After a certain amount of satirical gossip touching the appearance of the Assembly, dress of the members, and the like, Malvina proceeds to _the_ event of the day: "A black-coated orator occupied the tribune, recalling the memories of the Empire, and dwelling warmly on the exploits of the Polish lancers, when a formidable noise made itself heard. It seemed to come sometimes from without, sometimes from beneath the ground. I began to think coiners had established themselves in the palace vaults, or that the Allies had re-entered Paris to blow up the bridge of Jena. The noise had nothing sustained or regular,--it was in great bursts, followed by sudden silence. It is best to tell things as they are, my dear; no use flattering people. The first impression the Assembly experienced was disagreeable enough: there were some of the elect of the people, who may not have admitted it to themselves, but who would have liked to be elsewhere. A mere matter of preference! A deputy is a man, after all, and the roar at the door of the palace had nothing very soothing. However, the first emotion did not last; the sentiment of duty overcame it. They sat down and waited the event. I don't deny they listened less to Poland than to what passed outside, but their bearing was becoming, and their countenance good. You may believe me, for I am a judge."

Presently crash went the door, and there entered a legion of ruffians in blouses. The spectators' galleries and the body of the house were alike invaded. All the doors gave way, and the Chamber was thronged. The atmosphere was infected by the obscene multitude, reeking with wine and tobacco. Filthy flags were waved over the heads of the deputies. The vilest language was heard; the utmost confusion prevailed; not one of the intruders seemed to know why he was there, or what he came to do. The president was under a kind of arrest, guarded on one side by an artillery-man with drawn sabre, on the other by a ruffian dressed as a workman; and every moment the banners of the clubs were waved over his head. Sometimes he was almost pushed out of his arm-chair by the popular orators, who got astride upon its back, or stood upon his table. "The representatives," Madame Paturot speaks, "kept their seats, and did the Roman senator very tolerably. The rioters did not meddle much with them, except with two or three, who had scuffles with the insurgent leaders. Simon was one of those. His seat was under the gallery, and an insurgent, risking a perilous leap from the elevation, alighted upon his shoulders. Our miller was not accustomed to such treatment. A sack of flour--well and good; but a man was too much. He took this one by the collar, and shook him nearly to death. The fellow bellowed for assistance, but Simon's strength deterred interference, and the affair went no further. Others of the elect of the people were less fortunate, and received at the hands of their constituents a new baptism, not prescribed by the constitution. What then, Jerome? Who loves well chastises well. Thus did these sovereigns of the street testify their affection." The orator's tribune was besieged by the chiefs of the insurrection--all anxious to speak. It was continually assaulted and taken; one speaker pulled down, and another taking his place, to be, in his turn, expelled. Those who succeeded in making themselves heard, proposed absurdities. One clamoured for Poland; another would levy an impost of a thousand millions, to be paid by the rich; a third declared a traitor to his country whosoever should cause the drums to beat alarm; a fourth notified to the Assembly that it was then and there dissolved. This last announcement raised a hurricane. "The mob no longer shouted--it roared. The president still protesting, his arm-chair was carried by assault. In an instant every thing was swept away. The _bureau_ of the Assembly was filled with workmen, who assumed heroic postures, stamped upon and broke every thing. The representatives could do nothing in this scene of devastation. One by one they retired. The clubs remained masters of the field of battle, and the Red banner floated in the hall. The scene attained the utmost height of confusion. The clubs had the power, or thought they had, but knew not what to do with it. Lists were made out, and again destroyed. Names were proclaimed, and forthwith hissed. It was the Tower of Babel. Who can say how it would have ended but for the interference of the _mobile_? Brave _mobile_! At the very moment they were least expected, their drums resounded close at hand." The sound was enough for the rioters, who ran in every direction, and in ten minutes the hall was clear. Malvina subjoins her indignant reflections on these extraordinary scenes, casts a considerable deal of dirt upon the beards of the Provisional Government, and is curious to know what sort of fricassee Buonaparte would have made of such a set of braggarts and incapables.

Madame Paturot had borne herself with her accustomed valour in the midst of the scuffle, and was then under Simon's protection. Jerome, no longer anxious on her account, is about to retire to rest, when a tremendous noise is heard on the staircase, and Oscar rushes in, imploring shelter and concealment, and declaring himself a state criminal. He had been to the Hotel de Ville with the insurgents; Percheron and Comtois had recognised him, and, in memory of his having stood treat at Ville d'Avray, had elected him general on the spot. The Hotel de Ville taken, it was necessary to appoint a government. A party of workmen established themselves in a sumptuous saloon, on velvet cushions and rich carpets, to deliberate on this important point. Percheron had his list cut and dried in his head. It was heard with acclamation, at once adopted, and inscribed upon a slate hung against the wall. The three first names ran thus:--

OSCAR, President of the Council. PERCHERON, Minister of Finance. COMTOIS, Minister at War.

Surprised by the national guards just after the issue of a decree providing for its personal comforts, the new government was suddenly broken up. Assisted by Comtois, who forced two or three doors with his shoulder, Oscar escaped, pursued by horrible visions of an army of police on his track, of capture, a dungeon, or perhaps the scaffold. With the greatest difficulty Paturot persuades him that his retreat is not an object of diligent inquiry on the part of the executive, and that, during the day's brief anarchy, too many lists of new governments have been drawn up for particular attention to be paid to that, at whose head figures the name of the crack-brained artist. As a good precaution, however, he advises Oscar to shave his beard and his head, and take a course of cold douches, measures calculated to mislead as to his identity, and to calm the effervescence of his ideas.

But Oscar is incorrigible. A mob is for him an irresistible magnet. He must join it, and, having joined it, he must swell the cry for the crotchet of the hour. For a time (a _long_ time Paturot calls it, in consideration of the popular fickleness) the republic had been the ruling mania, and held undisputed sway with the multitude. Alone she waved her banners to the breeze, and filled the air with clamour, defying opposition. Suddenly a new sound was borne upon the gale, an echo of military glories not yet forgotten; a new standard was unfurled, inscribed with the names of Austerlitz and Jena. "The Empire raised its head; it had its emblems and its rallying-cries; it had also its candidates. The manifestation was sudden as it was unexpected. It had been thought that the Old Guard and the Emperor were done with: the latter slept under the granite of the Invalids; the former, sculptured on the Vendôme column, mounted spirally towards heaven. Dear and sacred memories! why disturb you by absurd pretensions? Why load you with the responsibility of ridiculous enterprises? Your greatest honour, your highest title, is your isolation in history, detached from past and future, like a terrible and luminous meteor." The people did not reason thus. They wanted change, a new toy, no matter what. Every night, from eight to ten, crowds assembled on the boulevard near the gates of St Denis and St Martin, (the old resort of the disaffected,) and animated discussions went on. Groups were formed, orators stood forth, the throng increased, the circulation was impeded, until at last the armed force appeared and the mob dispersed. For some time this was the order of every night. "Revolutionary emotions yielded the ground to imperial emotions. Vincennes was eclipsed by the fort of Ham. Was it calculation or impulse? Perhaps both: calculation on the part of the chiefs, impulse and enthusiasm on that of the people. Strange people, lovers of noise and gunpowder, who rush into the street without a motive, and fight to the death ignorant why or wherefore!"

Oscar was easily seized by the imperial mania. His dreams were of dinners at the sovereign's table, of the run of the palace, princely estates, and diamond snuff-boxes. According to him, art had never received such patronage as from Napoleon: and he greatly distressed and alarmed his friend Jérome, by spouting under gas-lamps highly-coloured harangues concerning the marvels of the imperial palace, and of the King of Rome's baptism. As Paturot drags him away one evening from his _al-fresco_ audience, they are followed and accosted by Comtois, who carries them off to a wine-house, to make an important communication to the general, as he persists in calling Oscar since the memorable day at the Hotel de Ville. The Emperor, he solemnly and mysteriously informs the friends, has arrived in Paris. His exact whereabout in the capital is not known. Some say he is in the _lanterne_ at the Pantheon, examining the city with his telescope; others are positive he has gone down into the Catacombs at the head of 42,000 Indians: but the general opinion, according to Comtois, is, that he has a plan for reducing Paris in three minutes by the clock. Comtois is of such evident good faith, that Paturot tries to undeceive him, telling him the Emperor is dead. Thereupon the giant smiles contemptuously, and, when Jérome persists, he looks upon him with suspicion. Then he condescends to give the reason of his credulity. His father had served in the dragoons of the Empress, and had stood sentry a hundred times at Napoleon's door, had followed him to the wars, had never left him, in short. "Comtois,"--these had been his last words to his son--"when they tell you the Emperor is dead, answer at once 'It is a lie of the enemy. The English spread the report; it is their interest to do so.' Yes, my son, though you be alone and unsupported, always maintain he is _not_ dead, and add that he will come back. In the court-yard of Fontainebleau he promised us he would, and he has never broken his promise."--"You understand, general," concluded Comtois to Oscar; "after that, there is not a word to be said. What can you have stronger than that?--a dragoon of the Empress, a mustache that grew gray in the service of the Emperor. It is authentic, at any rate." In the midst of this curious conversation, a private cab drives up to the door, and a gentleman sends in for Comtois, who presently returns, his face beaming with joy. The Emperor has inquired after him--after him, Comtois, native of Baume-les-Dames, son of a dragoon of the Empress! Who would not fight for such a man? Comtois is ready to empty his veins in his service. In a few days the coronation will take place--the Pope will come to Rheims on purpose--the Emperor has one thousand five hundred millions in his pocket to distribute to the needy, and has decided there shall be no more poor. All opposition will be in vain. Comtois is well assured England will scatter gold in Paris to raise opponents to Napoleon; but what then?--the imperialists are not without means of stimulating the people. And thereupon Comtois, after assuring himself there are no eavesdroppers, draws from under his blouse--a magnificent stuffed eagle. With this on the top of a flagstaff, and his father's uniform on his back, Comtois feels himself invincible. Paturot is unfeeling enough to inquire if he proposes exhibiting it for money. Comtois indignantly repudiates the idea. "It is our banner, sir," he says; "our banner for the great day. By it the sons of the Empire will be recognised. See the noble bird, the glorious fowl! I have already cut a pole to stick it upon. As to the tricolor flag, every body has got that. One government hands it over to another. But the eagle! the eagle is not so easily tamed; it has but one master, and that is the Emperor. The Emperor is come back, it is the eagle's turn!"

And Comtois departed, ready to brave any odds on behalf of his Emperor, and under shadow of the eagle's wing. "We have seen," says M. Reybaud, "how he understood the plot in which he was associated. This illusion was common at the time. More than one Parisian artisan, more than one villager of western France, believed he deposited in the electoral urn a vote in favour of the Emperor. The name preserved all its _prestige_, but did not delegate it. The inheritance was too heavy to support. It resembled the iron crown; none might touch it with impunity. There was much obscurity and misconception in what then occurred; more than one appeal was made to ignorance and credulity. The stuffed eagle had found a victim, the living eagle made others. Ambition played its part, and more than one personage beheld, in the perspective of the plot, visions of grand-crosses and senatorships."

We find M. Reybaud too veracious, in other parts of the book, to cast a doubt on his assertion that, in the year 1848, and in Paris, after Napoleon's coffin has been opened at Courbevoie, and his corpse deposited in the church of the Invalids, there still are to be found men sufficiently stupid and credulous to believe the Emperor alive, and to await his return. In the provinces, and especially in those most remote from the capital, we know, from actual observation, that within a very few years the Emperor's existence was an article of faith with thousands, who, like Comtois, looked upon the report of his death as a mere invention of the enemy. Although the imperial veterans are now scarcely more plentiful in France than the Peninsular heroes in this country, there still remain a sprinkling, who infect their children and grandchildren with their own superstitious fancies regarding Napoleon. The lower classes of provincial Frenchmen are not remarkable for intelligence, and they receive the traditions of the _vieux de l'Empire_, collected under the summer-porch, and in the winter-night's gossip, with a sort of semi-credence which a trifling corroborative circumstance ripens into implicit belief. The mutilated, red-ribboned relic of the Grande Armée, who tells, from beneath the shadow of the domestic vine, or from the bench at the _auberge_ door, such thrilling tales of past campaigns, of Austerlitz' glory and Moscow's snows, shakes his gray head doubtingly when he hears it said that Napoleon has perished, a captive and in solitude, on a rock of the distant ocean. The gesture is not lost on the gaping bumpkins, who greedily devour the old man's reminiscences. They muse on the matter whilst tracing the next morning's furrow, or perhaps, taken next day by the greedy conscription, they meet, at the regiment, some ancient corporal who confirms the impression they have received. The traditions of the barrack-room are all imperial; how should they be otherwise? Were not those the days when every recruit went to battle with a marshal's baton in his havre-sack,--when no rank, honours, or riches were beyond the grasp of the daring and fortunate soldier? The six years' service expires; the soldier returns to his plough--an election arrives, the name of Napoleon is every where placarded--interested persons tell the newly-fledged voter, as the gentleman in the cab told Comtois, that the _Petit Tondu_ has returned to France. The _soldat-laboureur_, whose prejudices are much strengthened, and his intelligence but little brightened, by his term of military service, doubts, hopes, is bewildered, and finally, in the uncertainty, votes for a stuffed bird instead of a genuine eagle.

We have dwelt so long upon Jérome Paturot that we can afford but a few lines to his brother in hosiery. Poor Monsieur Bonardin! Never, since humanity first took to stocking-wearing, was a vender of that useful article more scurvily treated than he was by the French republic of 1848. The 25th of February beheld him a prosperous man and an ardent republican,--"a republican of the morrow," certainly, but no worse for that; four months of liberty and fraternity brought him to ruin and suicide. At first, all his anticipations are rose-coloured. Increase of trade, an unlimited demand for hosiery, must be the consequences of the new order of things. He is fully persuaded great days are coming for the renowned establishment at the sign of the Spinning Monkey. The day after the revolution he opens his shop as usual, but only to be bullied by an _ouvrier_ who steps in to buy a red cap, finds none but white, curses Bonardin for a Carlist, and carries off his national guardsman's musket. Uproar recommences in the street; the shop is shut, and continues so for some days. The end of the month arrives; there are payments to be made, and M. Bonardin sends Criquet to the bank with bills for discount--first-rate paper at short date. Criquet brings them back; the best signatures no longer find cash. M. Bonardin is in all the agonies of a punctual paymaster who sees a chance of his signature's dishonour, when suddenly he is summoned to his duty as national guard. On his return, after a sleepless night and a fagging day, he has scarcely got amongst the blankets, when he is roused by voices in the street calling out, in a measured chant, for lamps at his windows.

_M. Bonardin_, awaking in alarm, and jumping out of bed--

What is that? (_Cries in the street, 'Des lampions! des lampions!'_) Good! here they are again with their infernal lamps! Impossible to sleep under this republic!

_Voices of boys in the street._--Hallo! first floor! Spinning Monkey! Lamps! lamps!

_M. Bonardin._--What a nuisance! (_calling out_)--Babet! Babet!

_The boys shouting_,--Lamps or candles!... break the ugly monkey's windows, if he does not light up directly!

_M. Bonardin._--Lord bless me!... Babet! Babet!...

_Babet_, (_running in_,)--What is it, sir?

_M. Bonardin._--Don't you hear them? Cut a candle in eight pieces directly. Not a minute to lose!

_The boys._--It's a _Carlisse_, (_Carlist_.) Hallo, there! lamps or candles!

_M. Bonardin_, (_in his nightgown, opening the window_.)--Directly, citizens, directly! A minute's patience!

_The boys._--Ah! there's the old monkey himself! Bravo! bravo!

'D'un sang impur engraissons nos sillons!'

_M. Bonardin_, (_flourishing his nightcap_.)--Yes, yes, my friends, _d'un sang impur!..._ Certainly, by all means; _Vive la République!_

_The boys._--_Vive la République!_ Down with the _Carlisses_! (_Babet enters with candle-ends; M. Bonardin retreats behind his bed-curtains._) Ah! there's the monkey's wife lighting up at last. Bravo! bravo! _Vive la République!_ The monkey's wife not bad-looking in her night-dress!

_Babet_, (_shutting the window_.)--Do you hear, sir, those ragamuffins call me your wife?

_M. Bonardin._--Well! are you not flattered?

_Babet._--Yes, indeed, the monkey's wife! It's flattering! They take me for an ape, then?

_M. Bonardin._--If they will only let me sleep at last. Midnight already.

_Babet._--Pray, sir, is this to last long? This is our sixth illumination. A whole packet of fives gone already!

_ M. Bonardin._--No, no, Babet--it is only the first moment. Recollect, the republic is but ten days old.... A single decade, no more.

_Babet._--A proper business it has been, your decade! Alarms at every hour of the day and night; the shop shut three-quarters of the time, and no buyers when it is open! A nice decade! And then the bank, that refuses your paper; and then your bills, which you can't pay; and then ...

_M. Bonardin._--Let me sleep, my poor Babet.... All that is very true; but what matter? We have got the republic; and you know as well as I do--THERE ARE NO ROSES WITHOUT THORNS."

With this trite saying, the epigraph of the book, Bonardin, a bit of a philosopher in his way, consoles himself, at the close of each disastrous decade, for the annoyances and calamities he has experienced in its course. These are countless, and of every kind. Now it is a polite note from the tax-gatherer, requesting him to pay down, in advance, the whole of the year's taxes, including an extraordinary contribution just decreed by government. Then Criquet, who has imbibed communist principles, insists on sharing his master's profits, and M. Bonardin is afraid to refuse. Criquet, however, is glad to fall back upon his wages, on finding that, instead of profit, the shop leaves a heavy loss. Next comes a scamp of a nephew, emancipated from Clichy by the abolition of imprisonment for debt, who gets his uncle into various scrapes; and a drunken godson, one Pacot, a soldier, who knocks his sponsor under the table, on pretence of his being reactionary. Bonardin goes to Rouen to assist at a wedding, and the railway takes him into a cross-fire, the town being in full revolution. Rent-day arrives, and he sets out as usual with receipts and a canvass-bag to collect the quarter's rent from the occupants of the five upper stories of his house; but nobody pays. The workman in the attics takes the receipt and refuses the money, threatening to hang out the black flag if his landlord insists. One tenant feigns madness--another declares himself ruined--a third denies himself. Poor Bonardin returns home with a heavy heart and an empty bag. In short, his misfortunes are innumerable. He is mixed up in revolts against his will, and without his knowledge; is sent to prison, thumped with musket-buts, hidden in a cask, robbed in the national workshop. Finally, at the end of the thirteenth decade, he stands upon the bridge leading to the National Assembly, his face partly concealed by a handkerchief, singing republican songs and asking alms. None give them. "I am a proprietor, my poor man," says one; "I can give you nothing." "Impossible, my good fellow," says the next; "I am a manufacturer." "No change," says a third; "I am a shopkeeper, and I sell nothing." "Sorry for you, my friend," replies another, "but I am an artist. In these times, that is as much as to tell you I have not a sou in the world." "Alas!" exclaims a fifth, "I would relieve you with pleasure, but I am a poor _employé_, and the revolution has struck off a quarter of my salary." "What ill luck!" cries Bonardin; "the revolution has ruined every body, it seems. But this is about the time when the representatives of the people repair to the National Assembly. They are generous, the worthy representatives. The millions they daily vote away sufficiently prove it. Courage! people who spend so many millions will perhaps give me a few coppers." He is mistaken; the deputies pass, but none give him any thing; whereupon he concludes they have not yet received their five-and-twenty francs. And as the republic will not give him bread, he resolves to seek water in the river, climbs the parapet, and throws himself into the Seine--thus tragically terminating the volume, which, up to that point, is a farce, both broad and long, crammed with jokes and double-entendres of various merit, but all exhibiting, in a light as unfavourable as it is true, the disastrous effects of the revolution upon the trade and prosperity of Paris.

We hoped to have included in this review the fourth volume of _Jérome Paturot_, but it has not yet reached us, only a portion of it being published. The work comes out in parts, and it is said the fourth volume will be the last of the series. In that case, it will probably close with the June revolt. If M. Reybaud likes, and dares, he may find in subsequent events abundant food for his satirical chronicle. Perhaps he will think fit to wait Cavaignac's exit before criticising his performance. There are numerous points in the brief history of the republic upon which he has not yet touched. We hope yet to accompany Jérome to the cell of an imprisoned journalist, to the court-martials upon the June insurgents, to debates in the Assembly, and to consultations in the cabinet. A retrospective flight to the days of the Convention, and an incidental inquiry into the antecedents of M. Cavaignac the father, of whose exploits the son has expressed himself so proud, were not without interest. But the subject we are especially curious to see M. Reybaud take up, is that of French journalism in 1848. He might fill a most amusing volume with an elucidation of its mysteries and rivalries; and we cannot believe, after reading the bold judgments and revelations contained in the three published volumes of _Jérome_, that he would be deterred from the task by apprehension of editorial wrath, whether expressed in the field or in the feuilleton, by a challenge or a criticism.

PROPHECIES FOR THE PRESENT.

Prophecies and miracles, we are told, have long since ceased upon the earth, as permitted only, by Divine goodness, to those ages when faith was not firmly established, and revelation needed the active and visible interference of Divine influence to make its way into the heart of obstinate and denying man. This is a doctrine which, in these present times of reason, we are naturally inclined to accept. But yet there are circumstances, occurring even in our day, which sometimes surprise the imagination, and even startle that reason which is so ready to assert its supremacy. It is thus that we have regarded with much curiosity, more wonder, and an impression which it is difficult to drive away from our minds, certain strange documents relative to the most important events of modern history, which, if their authenticity be accepted, are among the most striking revelations emanating from a prophetic spirit. They appear before us avowed prophecies, coming from seemingly well-authenticated sources, and backed by such assurances in the genuineness of their antiquity, from credible mouths, as takes off from them that paulo-post-future sort of suspicion, that inevitably attaches itself to predictions, which make their appearance to the world after fulfilment. In laying them before our readers, we are able to offer some little proof, as far as it goes, in support of their authenticity; and we still call to them the attention of those who may nevertheless refuse their credence, as highly interesting documents of a strange character, relating to past, present, and even future political events. As they do, in truth, refer also to a future still to be accomplished, as well as to the present, our readers, it is to be hoped, may be able to judge for themselves how far the predictions as to the future will bear out those which now already relate to the past, and to what, if such an expression may be pardoned, might be called the present just gone by.

Two of these revelations bear the character of direct and avowed prophecies, given _as such_ by holy men, and are imbued throughout with that mystic spirit, which, however incomprehensible as regards the future, becomes clear to an extraordinary degree of distinctness when applied to the test of the past: they wear, in fact, the strange air of predictions never intended to be comprehended until after their fulfilment; as if, even although the inspired soul of certain individual men had been permitted to raise itself, in its ecstasy, from the earth into those unknown realms where past and future are confounded in eternity, and shake off for the time the mortal trammels of our limited understanding, but retain still afterwards the consciousness and the power to reveal what there it saw; yet, by some mysterious dispensation, the revelations should not be allowed to be expounded in the clearness of their truth, so as to be comprehensible to the intellects of the uninspired and undeserving herd. Why, then, should the future be revealed, it might be asked, if the revelation should serve nothing to mankind? With such deep and awful mysteries we have not to deal: we cannot answer: we are of the blind who cannot lead the blind. At all events, if these documents be forgeries--mere devices fabricated after facts--and that they cannot be so _entirely_, will be seen hereafter--certainly a degree of genius that is almost incomprehensible presided over their fabrication, with this strange stamp of vague oracular language, which is only comprehensible in its after-application.

Such are two of these prophetic writings. As they are supposed to proceed from the mouths of religious men, renowned for the sanctity of their lives, they naturally refer more to the condition of the Christian church, and to the fate of the "faithful," than immediately to political events; but yet so closely is the destiny of the faithful of the Christian world mixed up inevitably with the destiny of men and countries in general, that the political events of our day are there set down in prediction, with all the minuteness which the vague and mystic language of prophetic revelation, dimly depicting what even the inspired eye can only dimly trace in cloudy vision, "through a glass darkly," is able to bestow upon detail. The third revelation assumes to be no more than an interpretation of the prophetical book of the New Testament, and repudiates all supposition of aiming at any spirit of prophecy in itself; a portion, however, of this interpretation of a part of Scripture so obscure as the book of the Revelation, is so remarkable in its application to present events, as to wear the very air of prophecy that its interpreter repudiates.

The longer and more important of the two prophecies, which have both appeared in France, and refer chiefly to events immediately connected with French history, is one popularly designated as the "Prophecy of Orval:" it has been already translated into English, and published,[12] with a preface, an introduction, and explanatory notes, chiefly referring to the authenticity of the document, and to its possession in the hands of a variety of credible and respectable persons during the whole of the present century, and some of the later years of the last. The little pamphlet has been got up with much intelligence, and apparently with a strictly conscientious spirit. We cannot here follow the editor through all the details he lays before us, to prove that the prophecy has been copied from a book printed at Luxembourg in the year 1544, and recopied, by gentlemen of standing and respectability, from copies already made, as early as the year 1792--or through all the evidence adduced, some years ago, in such respectable religious French papers as the _Invariable_, and the _Propagateur de la Foi_, accompanied by notes from the editor himself, with regard to his own personal experience, and the testimony he has received from personages worthy of the highest credit, known to himself. It may be said, however, that he communicates extracts of letters and other authorities, which, could they be forgeries, would assuredly be some of the most ingenious of the kind, even if they had any great end or aim in their fabrication; and it ought to be added, that a great part of this testimony is compiled from a _brochure_ called _The Oracle for 1840_, and published by a certain Henry Dujardin in Paris, in the month of March 1840, consequently anterior, at all events, to the remarkable circumstances of the present day. On these matters we must refer our readers to the interesting little pamphlet itself. The authority upon which rests the fact that the prophecy, generally known under the title of "_Les Prévisions d'Orval_," and entitled "Certain Previsions revealed by God to a Solitary, for the Consolation of the Children of God," was actually printed at Luxembourg in the year 1544, seems every way as conclusive as possible in such matters of ancient lore; and the writer of this present paper has only to add that he himself has seen in Paris the whole prophecy, as far as it is still in existence, printed in a newspaper of the year 1839, (he _believes_, as far as his memory reaches, in the _Journal des Villes et des Campagnes_), and consequently, to his own knowledge, published to the world previously, at least, to the events of the present year; that an old English lady, upon whose faith he can implicitly rely, positively declared to him that she had it in her hands as early as the year 1802, and thus even before the crowning of Napoleon as Emperor; and that its reappearance, since the breaking out of the revolution of this year, excited so much sensation in the French capital, that measures were taken by the republican government of the day to establish a sort of _surveillance_ over persons known to possess and propagate the prediction--a fact also mentioned by the editor of the English pamphlet--as conspirators against the stability of the republic. With these premises, we proceed to do no more than lay before our readers the prophecy in question, claiming for the notice that follows such credence as every man's conviction or scepticism, imagination or cooler reason, may choose to bestow.

[12] _Prophecy of Orval._ James Burns: 1848.

The Abbey of Orval, from which the prediction has taken its title, was, it appears, a religious institution, situated in the diocese of Treves, on the frontiers of Luxembourg; and it is said that the abbot and the monks, when they fled from their convent, during the siege of Luxembourg by the French revolutionary army, to the "refuge" in the town, conveying a part of their archives as well as their sacred vessels with them, first communicated the _printed_ copy of the _Previsions of a Solitary_ of 1544 to Marshal Bender, who commanded the army, and other French gentlemen, by whom copies were then taken as a matter of curiosity, and put in circulation. Tradition at that time attributed the prediction to a monk of the name of Philip Olivarius, although the exact period of the existence of the "Solitary" does not appear to have been well known. What at present remains, or is supposed to remain, commences only with the history of Napoleon Buonaparte, although the "Oracle" of Henri Dujardin speaks of the prediction relative to the death of Louis XVI. as having excited considerable sensation among the emigrant circles of that time; and the circumstance of the absence of any events anterior to the prophecy, as it stands at present, is accounted for by a remark made in the _Propagateur de la Foi_, that, when it was discovered, at the conclusion of the last century, the copyists generally neglected to transcribe what related to the past, and contented themselves only with that portion, the accomplishment of which was still to come.

The prophecy, as will be seen, astoundingly and suspiciously minute in its details; but yet, when the predictions as to the future are considered--to our eyes at present so vague and mysterious, and still perhaps in their fulfilment, if so it should prove, as exact in detail,--it may well be imagined that the portions which now refer to the past, may in their day have appeared equally mysterious and vague. It runs as follows, as it now stands:--

"At that time a young man, come from beyond the sea into the country of Celtic Gaul, shows himself strong in counsel. But the mighty to whom he gives umbrage will send him to combat in the land of Captivity. Victory will bring him back. The sons of Brutus will be confounded at his approach, for he will overpower them, and take the name of emperor. Many high and mighty kings will be sorely afraid, for the eagle will carry off many sceptres and crowns. Men on foot and horse, carrying blood-stained eagles, and as numerous as gnats in the air, will run with him throughout Europe, which will be filled with consternation and carnage; for he will be so powerful, that God shall be thought to combat on his side. The church of God, in great desolation, will be somewhat comforted, for she shall see her temples opened again to her lost sheep, and God praised. But all is over, the moons are passed."

It must be remarked here, that the moons, continually alluded to in the prophecy, may be found, by the calculation of thirteen lunar mouths to a year, to arrive at an extraordinary accuracy of prediction as to the date of the events prophesied: those which have been mentioned above must be considered to refer probably to a period of time alluded to in the portion of the "Previsions" supposed to be lost.

"But all is over; the moons are passed. The old man of Sion cries to God from his afflicted heart; and behold! the mighty one is blinded for his crimes. He leaves the great city with an army so mighty, that none ever was seen to be compared to it. But no warrior will be able to withstand the power of the heavens; and behold! the third part, and again the third part, of his army has perished by the cold of the Almighty. Two lustres have passed since the age of desolation; the widows and the orphans have cried aloud to the Lord, and behold! God is no longer deaf. The mighty, that have been humbled, take courage, and combine to overthrow the man of power. Behold, the ancient blood of centuries is with them, and resumes its place and its abode in the great city; the great man returns humbled to the country beyond the sea from which he came. God alone is great! The eleventh moon has not yet shone, and the bloody scourge of the Lord returns to the great city; the ancient blood quits it. God alone is great! He loves his people, and has blood in abhorrence; the fifth moon has shone upon many warriors from the east. Gaul is covered with men, and with machines of war; all is finished with the man of the sea. Behold again returned the ancient blood of the Cap! God ordains peace, that His holy name be blessed. Therefore shall great peace reign throughout Celtic Gaul. The white flower is greatly in honour, and the temples of the Lord resound with many holy canticles. But the sons of Brutus view with anger the white flower, and obtain a powerful edict, and God in consequence is angry on account of the elect, and because the holy day is much profaned; nevertheless God will await a return to Him during eighteen times twelve moons. God alone is great! He purifies His people by many tribulations; but an end will also come upon the wicked. At this time a great conspiracy against the white flower moves in the dark, by the designs of an accursed band; and the poor old blood of the Cap leaves the great city, and the sons of Brutus increase mightily. Hark! how the servants of the Lord cry aloud to him! The arrows of the Lord are steeped in His wrath for the hearts of the wicked. Woe to Celtic Gaul! The cock will efface the white flower; and a powerful one will call himself king of the people. There will be a great commotion among men, for the crown will be placed by the hands of workmen who have combated in the great city. God alone is great! The reign of the wicked will wax more powerful; but let them hasten, for behold! the opinions of the men of Celtic Gaul are in collision, and confusion is in all minds."

It must here be again remarked that, as regards the accomplishment of the events which follow immediately in the prophecy, the writer has himself seen this record in a printed form--since the fulfilment, it is true, but in a newspaper published in the year 1839.

"The king of the people will be seen very weak: many of the wicked will be against him; but he was _ill-seated_; and, behold! God hurls him down." How striking is the expression, "_mal assis!_" To proceed: "Howl, ye sons of Brutus! Call unto you the beasts that are about to devour you. Great God! what a noise of arms! a full number of moons is not yet completed, and, behold, many warriors are coming!"

This advance of many warriors upon the capital is an event which, according to the prophecy, must be accomplished before a full number of moons is completed, or, it would seem, within the year from the date of the outbreak of the Revolution. These warriors are not said to come from any foreign lands. May they be supposed--in accepting the truth of the prediction--to refer to the march of the national guards of the departments upon Paris, from all parts of France, at the time of the outbreak of June? or do the words remain still to be verified in a more striking manner? The period of the "ten times six moons, and yet again six times ten moons," of which mention is about to be made, is peculiarly vague and uncertain, as are the predictions, as far as time is concerned, of all the events to come. According to the calculation adopted, this period of time would be that of about nine years and a quarter. Is the accomplishment of the awful prediction that follows, to be delayed for such a space of time? An enlightened churchman has conceived that this calculation of moons refers to the past period, during which the church was oppressed, and the anger of the Lord excited in the first French Revolution, when the "measure of wrath was filled." But, then, is the desolation to come to be accomplished also, like "the advance of the many warriors," before "a full number of moons is completed"--_i. e._, within a year? This is one of the mysterious obscurities already alluded to, which are the attributes of all prophecy, and of which time alone can give a solution--if a solution is to be given. The details relative to the more immediately ensuing events are precise enough: it is only the date of their accomplishment that seems involved in the dimness of insolvable obscurity. Thus runs the denunciation--the prediction of desolation to be poured out like another "vial of wrath" over the doomed city of Paris.

"It is done! The mountain of the Lord hath cried in its affliction unto God. The sons of Judah have cried unto God from the land of the foreigner; and, behold! God is no longer deaf. What fire accompanies His arrows! Ten times six moons, and yet again six times ten moons, have fed His wrath. Woe to the great city! Behold the kings armed by the Lord! But already hath fire levelled thee with the earth. Yet the faithful shall not perish. God hath heard their prayer. The place of crime is purified by fire. The waters of the great stream have rolled on towards the sea all crimsoned with blood. Gaul, as it were dismembered, is about to reunite. God loves peace. Come, young prince, quit the isle of captivity. Listen! from the lion to the white flower! come!"

It may be well understood now why the republican government of France attaches so much importance to the fact of the propagation of this prophecy, which formally predicts the return of the last bud of the white flower, or lily of the Bourbons. Its publication was looked upon as a manœuvre of the Legitimist faction, to prepare the minds of men for the advent of Henri V., and, by exciting men's imaginations, to tend towards the accomplishment of the prediction--with the foreknowledge that hazarded predictions will often help to accomplish themselves by the very natural course of events which they, in themselves, produce. At all events, the promulgators of such a prophecy, which definitively predicted the overthrow of the republic, were to be considered as being among its enemies, and were carefully watched in their movements as such. The writer of the present paper, however, who was in Paris during the period when the "Previsions of Orval" first began to create a sensation, can confidently assert that copies were handed about, even among the silenced Legitimists, as curious and interesting documents only, and without the least pretence of that _arrière pensée_, which the government of the republic chose to ascribe to its circulation. The allusion to the "lion," is peculiarly obscure. Belgium and England are the only countries that bear a lion on their arms. A union with a daughter of the dynasty reigning in the former, can scarcely be contemplated, since the young prince alluded to is already married. A strict alliance with one or the other country--or perhaps more especially with England, as more generally typically represented by the lion--might be supposed to bear out the fulfilment of the prediction. The Orval prophecy then goes on to predict the firm establishment of the child of the "white flower" on his throne.

"What is foreseen, that God wills. The ancient blood of centuries will again terminate long struggles. A sole pastor will be seen in Celtic Gaul. The man made powerful by God will be firmly seated. Peace will be established by many wise laws. So sage and prudent will be the offspring of the Cap, that God will be thought to be with him. Thanks to the Father of Mercies, the Holy Sion chants again in her temples to the glory of one Lord Almighty."

The future previsions of the prophecy become necessarily more and more obscure; although those, which more immediately follow, are sufficiently distinct, much as their accomplishment may be a matter of very necessary doubt.

"Many lost sheep come to drink at the living spring. Three kings and princes throw off the mantle of heresy, and open their eyes to the faith of the Lord. At that time two third parts of a great people of the sea will return to the true faith. God is yet blessed during fourteen times six moons, and six times thirteen moons. But God is wearied of bestowing his mercies; and yet, for the faithful's sake, he will prolong peace during ten times twelve moons. God alone is great! The good is passed away. The saints shall suffer. The Man of Sin shall be born of two races. The white flower becomes obscured during ten times six moons, and six times twenty moons. Then it shall disappear to be seen no more. Much evil, and little good, will there be in those days. Many cities shall perish by fire. Israel then returns entirely to Christ the Lord. The accursed and the faithful shall be separated into two distinct portions. But all is over. The third part of Gaul, and again the third part and a half, will be without faith. The same will be among other nations. And behold! six times three moons, and four times five moons, and there is a general falling off, and the end of time has begun. After a number, not complete, of moons, God will combat in the persons of His two just ones. The Man of Sin shall carry off the victory. But all is over! The mighty God has placed before my comprehension a wall of fire. I can see no more. May He be blessed evermore. Amen."

Thus terminates the reputed prophecy of the Solitary of Orval. The conclusion has been supposed to imply a prediction of the end of the world; and, by the calculation of the number of as many moons as are mentioned, that event would thus take place within a period of fifty years from the present time. But it does not appear absolutely to follow that the "wall of fire" placed before the comprehension of the inspired Solitary, that he should see no more, should be referred to the "end of all things," because he has exclaimed just previously--"But all is over!" This expression he has already used before in a different sense. Any disquisition, however, upon the uncertain fulfilment of a very uncertain prophecy, would be again a discursive ramble, that would lead us much too far out of our beat.

The other French prophecy, to which allusion has been made, professes to be only of a much later date. It is said to have emanated from a Jesuit priest, who died towards the end of the last century at Bordeaux, in the "odour of sanctity," and to have been communicated by him to a novice residing with him in an establishment of the Jesuits at Poitiers, some time previous to the outbreak of the first French Revolution. It is supposed to have been transcribed and preserved by the novice, who afterwards became himself a Jesuit priest, and by him to have been given into the hands of several persons, who still possess it, or who may have in turn given circulation to it. Not much importance was attached to it until the events of the Revolution, which confirmed so many of its predictions, were accomplished; and again, since the events of the present year, it has been called to men's minds. Like the Orval prophecy, its predictions, as regards what is now past, have been wonderfully distinct, and, relative to the events of this present year, no less so. With respect to its existence previously to these latter events, the writer can also give testimony, as in the case of the Orval prophecy, that it was transcribed as far back as the year 1836, from the mouth of the _supérieure_ of a convent in Lyons, who testified that she had heard it from the novice to whom it was first delivered. The authenticity of its prophetic revelations can thus be proved as far as regards the present day. It bears, in many respects, a great analogy to the Previsions of the Solitary of Orval, and the predictions it delivers coincide in most respects with the latter: but it contains distinct references to other events, of which the Orval prophecy makes no mention. As the revelation also of a holy churchman, prophetically inspired, its contents naturally refer, in a great measure, to the state of the church, or perhaps even to the condition of the order of the Jesuits alone. The whole is necessarily couched in mysterious language in this respect: and it ought, perhaps, to be premised that the "counter-revolution" alluded to refers to the triumph of the priesthood in general, or, as was before said, of the Jesuit order. The portions of this prophecy which have fallen into the writer's hands refer only to the events immediately following the fall of Napoleon; although he has been assured that, in other copies, it goes back to circumstances antecedent to the first Revolution.

"There will then be a reaction," says the portion now before us, "which shall be thought to be the counter-revolution--it will last during some years, so that people shall suppose that peace is really restored: but it will be only a patchwork--an ill-sewn garment. There will be no schism; but still the Church shall not triumph. Then shall come disturbances in France: a name hateful to the country shall be placed upon the throne. It will not be until after that event that the counter-revolution shall take place. It will be done by strangers. But two parties will first be formed in France, who will carry on a war of extermination. One party will be much more numerous than the other, but the weaker shall prevail. Blood will flow in the great towns, and the convulsion shall be such that men might think the last day to be at hand. But the wicked will not prevail, and in this dire catastrophe shall perish of them a great multitude. They will have hoped to have utterly destroyed the Church; but for this they will not have had time, for the fearful crisis shall be of short duration. There will be a movement when it will be supposed that all is lost; but still all shall be saved. The faithful shall not perish; such signs will be given them as shall induce them to fly the city. During this convulsion, which will extend to other lands, and not be for France alone, Paris shall be so utterly destroyed, that when, twenty years afterwards, fathers shall walk with their children, and the children shall ask, 'Why is that desolate spot?' they shall answer, 'My children, here once stood a great city, which God destroyed for its crimes.' After this fearful convulsion, all will return to order, and the counter-revolution shall be made. Then shall the triumph of the Church be such that nothing like it shall be ever seen again, for it will be the last triumph of the Church on earth."

In one respect, at least, this prophesy has already taken a step towards fulfilment. "Two parties shall be formed in France." Does not the struggle between the Moderates and the Red-Republicans still harass the land? "They will carry on a war of extermination." Have they not already commenced it in June in the streets of Paris? "One party will be much more numerous than the other." The Moderate party is well known to have an immense majority throughout the country. "But the weaker shall prevail"--for a time, that is--goes on to say the fearful prediction. That result lies yet in the womb of fate. The probabilities of its fulfilment we shrink from investigating--the more so, as it is a conviction which has always instinctively forced itself upon our minds. In all their previsions on this subject, the two prophesies, as far as they go, perfectly agree. We do not even leave the sceptical the pleasure of finding out that "doctors differ." The collision of parties--the devouring beasts--and the eventual destruction of the "great city" in the struggle--are circumstances foretold in both, with a graphic force which gives them almost the minuteness of details relative to a history of the past. The triumph of the Church, after this great convulsion, is likewise prophesied by both. The Orval previsions, more diffuse as to general history, alone connect this event with the restoration of a Prince of the Lily. On the contrary, however, the prediction of the Jesuit--as yet only occupied with the interests of his Church--now goes on to foretell historical events, of which the Orval prophecy makes no mention. The two do not contradict each other, but each mentions circumstances of which the other does not speak.

"These events shall be known to be at hand," continues the Poitiers prophecy, "by the sign that England shall begin to suffer throes of pain, even as it is known that the summer is nigh when the fig-tree puts forth its leaves. England shall experience a revolution, which will be of sufficient duration to give unhappy France time to breathe. Then it shall be by the assistance of France that England shall be fully restored to peace."

Certainly there appears at present no probability of any accomplishment of this part of the prediction. And, whatever vague faith we may place in our innermost hearts upon the authenticity of these prophecies, we should be very glad to find ourselves, and avow ourselves, and even proclaim ourselves, utter dupes, rather than witness the slightest approach to a fulfilment of the last paragraph of the Jesuit priest's oracular revolutions. He has given us, however, a fair chance of learning the truth of his prediction, or of giving him the lie in his coffin, by an answer, which the tradition preserved by the excellent _supérieure_ of the convent of the Sacré Cœur at Lyons reports that he made, when asked as to the period of the fulfilment of his prophecies--for he had not, like the Solitary of Orval, been at all precise in his arithmetical calculations of moons, or other methods of bestowing dates, as we have seen. His answer is said to have been, that those who saw the first French Revolution, and who lived through this crisis, would bless God for having preserved them to be witnesses of the great triumph of His Church. Consequently, the events foretold ought to receive their fulfilment in a period of time within the probable life of a man born before the epoch of 1789; and thus, reckoning the "threescore years and ten" as the utmost limit of man's natural life, before the year 1859. We ourselves, and all our readers, it is to be hoped, have thus the probabilities before us of testing the powers of prophecy of the good old gentleman of Poitiers. And yet, if they are to be verified to the letter as concerns "Old England," we cannot add "May we be there to see."

Beyond these two prophecies, there are others which at the present time abound in France; but as we are unable to offer any evidence whatever as to their authenticity of antiquity, we shall not enter into their details, much less into any disquisition as to their credibility. Most of them predict the utter destruction of Paris by fire, during a convulsion occasioned by insurrection and civil war. The best known are those of Bug de Thilas, a prophet of the Pyrenees in the sixteenth century--a Breton traditionary prediction, which enters into very minute and graphic details relative to the great fire of Paris, and fixes the epoch for this disaster in the nineteenth century; and the far better known and somewhat famous _Prophétie Lorraine_, in verse, in which the same event is foretold. This latter prophecy enters into very minute poetical descriptions of the great catastrophe, and warns the Parisian that he will perish entirely by his own fault. It is more especially curious, inasmuch as a calculation has been made by a good, hearty, and sound believer in such predictions, in which it is shown that, by taking the most striking and important words of the prediction, and reckoning each letter as a number, according to its standing in the alphabet--"a" as 1, "b" as 2, "c" as 3, &c.--the sum total of all the letters, thus reckoned, will amount to eighteen hundred and forty-nine. Of course, also, the prediction made by Lady Hester Stanhope to Lamartine, as recorded by that author in his _Voyage en Orient_, and founded by herself on cabalistic and astronomical calculations, found enthusiastic commentators in France, when the poet at last reached the object of his ambition, and became a statesman, by being placed at the summit of power in the revolutionary government.

The other prediction, or rather prophetic deduction from analytical interpretations of the Book of Revelations, to which allusion has been made, is too singular not to take its place also among these supposed "foreshadowings of coming events." At the same time, we do not attempt to rank it in any way in the same category with those strange and doubtful revelations already given. It is based upon a system of reasoning and calculation: a key is given as the real and true one, for the opening of the door of mysteries of acknowledged divine origin. How far this key may be the right one or the wrong, or how far it may be permitted to use it, are, once more, subjects for disquisition into which it is not for us to enter. The contrast between the nature of the revelations of the Roman Catholic ascetics, and of those of the Protestant clergyman, is striking enough to preclude any analogy between them. On the one hand, we have confident predictions; on the other, the cool, calm, searching, calculations of a system of minute reasoning;--on the one, the supposed bestowal of the flash of light; on the other, the careful groping in the mystical darkness of sacred writings, in order with true conscience to find the right way;--on the one, the pictorial, graphic, highly-coloured language of the presumed "_divine afflatus_;" on the other, the deductions of speculative reasoning;--on the one, the supposed flame coming from above; on the other, the cautious steps planted on the earth;--in short, on the one, supposed inspiration; on the other, evident and acknowledged reason. We do not pretend to class them together; but as they all refer to the same periods of history, they find mention together in this notice.

The Rev. Robert Fleming was the Protestant minister of the Scotch churches at Rotterdam and Leyden, and afterwards of the Presbyterian church of Lothbury, during the reign of William III.; he was renowned for his piety as well as his learning, and was even much favoured by the reigning monarch. His _Discourse concerning the Rise and Fall of Papacy_, in which the prophetic deductions have been formed, was published in the year 1701. The species of mystical history of the Romish church, which forms the main subject of his work, is sought for entirely, by the author, in the prophetic enunciations of the Book of Revelations; and in order to attach a great interest to his interpretations, and the deductions thence drawn, it is necessary to accept _à priori_, as a matter of faith, those _postulata_, which the author considers certain at his very outset, and which he sets down as incontrovertible,--namely, that "the Revelations contain the series of all the remarkable events and changes of the state of the Christian church to the end of the world;" that "The mystical Babylon _doth_ typify Rome in an anti-Christian church state;" that "The seven heads of the beast _are_ indubitably the seven forms of government that obtained successively among the Romans;" and that, consequently, "The grand apocalyptical question answers the great antichrist," which is thus assumed to be Papal Rome. Once more, it is not our present purpose to enter into any theological discussions: we do no more than place before our readers the curious and interesting deduction of a divine, celebrated for his piety, his learning, and his sacred research. The key with which Fleming proceeds to open the mysteries of what he calls "the dark apocalyptical times and periods," is certainly of singularly ingenious construction. He commences by entering into a proof that the different periods mentioned, of 1260 days, of forty-two months, and of "a time, times, and a half," are absolutely synchronical, and refer exactly to the same period of time, being meant to describe the duration of the anti-Christian kingdom; and that each day must be taken to mean prophetically a year, or Julian year of that age. By a similarly ingenious calculation, relative to the dates and times of days, he ascribes the period, as regards the church, to the so-called rotations of the all-enlightening sun; and as refers to the Beast, to the rotations of the unstable moon. Upon these calculations he goes on, with singularly marvellous ability, and an infinite patience of minute reckoning, to comment upon the apocalyptic prophecies. He traces thus the regular series of the prophecy, in the opening of the seven seals, which, in his application of historical events, he refers to the condition of the Christian church during the Roman empire;--of the seven trumpets, as bearing relation to the gradual growth and increase of the anti-Christian enemies of the church;--and, lastly, of the seven vials, as plagues and judgments poured out upon that Babylon, which he assumes to be "Rome Papal;" and the vials, more especially, he argues upon as types of the struggles between the Roman and the Reformed parties, each vial typifying an event, or conclusion of some new periodical attack of the former upon the latter. It is not necessary to follow the ingenious and indefatigable commentator through all his explanations of the other vials; we only refer to his deductions as bearing upon "Prophecies for the Present." Our business lies chiefly with his interpretation of the fifth vial, inasmuch as, by his system of calculation, he predicts the fulfilment of this vial for a period, which, by a singular coincidence at least, he fixes between the two dates of 1794 and 1848. It is the express mention of this latter year which naturally attracts the attention as an extraordinary coincidence, at a moment when, in that year, so many convulsions, and so many events important in the history of the world, have taken place. There is no precise prophetic deductions, however, attached by the interpreter to this latter _datum_, except that he fixes it as the period of the fall, or at least of the tottering and probable decline, of the Papal power; and, in the present wavering condition of the temporal power of the sovereign pontiff, the deduction has, at least, a singular bearing upon the events of the latter year specified. It was at the period of the former year, however, that the interpretations of Fleming, made at a time when France was in the zenith of her power, and there seemed no probability whatever of their justice, excited at first a great sensation; probably at the time of their delivery they were looked upon merely as matters of interesting and patient analysis. In commenting upon the fourth vial of the Revelations, which he mentions as likely to expire about the year 1794, he says--"the pouring out of this vial on the sun must denote the humiliation of some eminent potentates, whose influence and countenance cherish and support the Papal cause. And these, therefore, may be principally understood of the houses of Austria and Bourbon." In continuing to give his opinion concerning the events connected with this vial, and much posterior to the time in which he lived, we have the following striking expressions also, which, even in their serious importance, are not without their quaint humour:--"Perhaps the French monarchy may begin to be considerably humbled about that time; for whereas the French king takes the sun for his emblem, and this for his motto--'_Nec plurìbus impar_,' he may at length, or rather his successors, and the monarchy itself, (at least before the year 1794,) be forced to acknowledge that (in respect to neighbouring potentates) he is even _singulis impar_." The extraordinary coincidence between these intimations and the date fixed by the interpreter, when the first French Revolution took place, could not fail to strike the minds of those who were acquainted with his work. Accordingly, the _Discourse_ was republished in 1792, and was read and commented upon with avidity; and now that, in the year he named as 1848, another of his prophetic intimations came to be more or less exemplified, and another coincidence was destined to strike the minds of men, after the sagacious and learned interpreter had been dead nearly a century and a half, the whole discourse has been again republished in a variety of forms, and very widely circulated.

It has been "in fear and trembling" that we have ventured to approach any subject of so sacred a character, inasmuch as it refers to undeniable divine revelations, and bears upon one of the books of the Holy Scriptures: the matter, however, was so intimately connected with our present subject, that it could not be well avoided. Upon the absolute acceptance of Fleming's interpretations, and upon his assumption, _à priori_, that the "scarlet woman of Babylon" and the anti-Christ do verily typify the Papal power, we must needs be still more cautious of entering into any argument: it is not for us to reason upon the "how, when, and where" of the anti-Christian "denying spirit."

As connected with "Prophecies for the Present," the writer may yet add one other, which was known to him in Germany many years ago. The latter part of it runs as follows:--"I would not be a king in 1848. I would not be a soldier in 1849. I would not be a gravedigger in 1850." There was an awful solemnity in these last words, that always struck fearfully upon the imagination. "I would be any thing you will in 1851." Again, also, there is a vague ambiguous sense in this latter expression, that gives a shudder to the whole frame. "What you will!" Does the term refer to future hope in better days, or is it the recklessness of despair? There were, attached to this prophecy, other remarks respecting the preceding years: they referred to the corn-blade and the vine-plant; but they have now passed too much out of the writer's memory to be exactly recorded.

Before we quit the subject of the "Prophecies for the Present," it may be as well to allude to a comparison of the coincidences between the events of the revolution of July and that of the present year, which has been ingeniously compiled by a certain M. Langlois. The analogy between the circumstances of these different epochs forms a curious page in modern history, and is not without its peculiar interest; and also, as far as the events of the earlier epoch were singularly prophetic of those of the latter, these striking coincidences may almost be said to belong to the predictions of the day.

In the elder branch of the Bourbons, the Duke de Berri, the son of Charles X., espoused a foreign princess, and had by her a son, who was regarded as the heir to the throne: in the younger, the Duke of Orleans, the son of Louis Philippe I., likewise espoused a foreign princess, and had by her a son, likewise regarded as the eventual heir of the dynasty. The father of the Duke de Bordeaux was assassinated on the _13th_ of February 1820; the father of the Count of Paris died by an accident on the _13th_ of July 1842. In both the years preceding the fall of either monarch, the price of provisions was at an excessive height, the want was great, and the cold such that the Seine was frozen over--a circumstance which did not occur between the winters of 1829 and 1847. In both instances, the anti-liberal tendencies of the heads of the state, after most inviting promises, called forth from their best friends remonstrances upon the course they were pursuing, and warnings of an approaching crisis, which in both instances were rejected. In both instances, the last speech of the crown to the parliament assembled, contained words concerning the "culpable manœuvres," or "blind inimical passions," of the Opposition which created the discontent, and called forth the protest of several deputies, and the resolution to hold the famous banquet. The capture of the Dey of Algiers, and that of Abd-el-Kader, which immediately preceded each catastrophe, were both in vain considered as triumphs by the ministry of the day. The ordinances of July suspended the liberty of the press; an ordinance in February prohibited the banquet. In both cases these ordinances caused a commotion in the capital, and a species of presentiment of revolution on the Monday evening; on the following day the revolt broke out, and lasted during three days, commencing on the Tuesday, and terminating on the Thursday; and the power fell into the hands of the insurgents. The gendarmerie in the one case, the municipal guard--another name for the same corps--in the other, offered the chief defence of royalty, were overcome, and finally disbanded. Charles X. fell from his throne at the age of seventy-four, Louis Philippe at the same age; the one in July, the month in which the Duke of Orleans died--the other in February, the month in which the Duke de Berri was assassinated. Each monarch abdicated in favour of his grandson; each was met by the fatal cry, "_Il est trop tard_." In each case a provisional government was established, and the royal family was obliged to quit the French territory; both the monarchs sought a refuge in England. Here, however, the "coincidences" offer a striking dissimilitude. The one monarch was accompanied, in his departure, by his guards and numbers of faithful servitors--the other fled poor, wretched, and in disguise, abandoned by those who had called themselves his friends: the one shed tears on landing in the country of exile--the other hailed it with joy. In both cases, the ministers of the fallen king were impeached. In even smaller circumstances, other coincidences have been recorded. During the combats of both revolutions, the temperature was excessively warm for the season of the year--a circumstance not wholly without its weight, if the well-known barometric nature of the Parisian temperament be considered; and a few days after, in both years, an extraordinarily terrific tempest burst over the capital, obscured it for many hours in darkness, and swept down the new flag placed aloft upon the column of the Place Vendôme.

Coincidences, predictions, revelations--all may, perhaps, be looked upon, by the sceptically reasoning mind of plain matter-of-fact, with scorn. To such, then, they are here only given as curious matters of historical interest. At the same time, in the uncertainty as to the issue of the convulsions under the throes of which Europe is at present writhing, the troubled mind may surely attach itself to the obscure revelations of such strange announcements, and endeavour clearly to see its way through their dimness, without too much deserving the stigma usually attached to superstitious credulity.

SIGISMUND FATELLO.

CHAP. I.--THE OPERA.

It was a November night of the year 184-. For a week past, the play-bills upon the convenient but unsightly posts that disfigure the boulevards, had announced for that evening, in conspicuous capitals, the first performance of a new opera by a popular composer. Although the season of winter gaieties had scarcely begun, and country-houses and bathing-places retained a portion of the fashionable population of Paris, yet a string of elegant carriages, more or less coroneted, extended down the Rue Lepelletier, and deposited a distinguished audience at the door of the Académie de Musique. The curtain fell upon the first act; and a triple round of applause, of which a little was attributable to the merits of the opera, and a good deal to the parchment palms of a well-drilled _claque_, proclaimed the composer's triumph and the opera's success, when two men, entering the house at opposite sides, met near its centre, exchanged a familiar greeting, and seated themselves in contiguous stalls. Both belonged to the class which the lower orders of Parisians figuratively designate as _gants jaunes_; the said lower orders conscientiously believing primrose gloves to be a covering as inseparable from a dandy's fingers as the natural epidermis. The younger of these two men, the Viscount Arthur de Mellay, was a most unexceptionable specimen of those _lions dorés_ who, in modern French society, have replaced the _merveilleux_, the _roués_, and _raffinés_ of former days. Sleek of face and red of lip, with confident eye and trim mustache, his "getting up" was evidently the result of deep reflection on the part of the most tasteful of tailors and scrupulous of valets. From his varnished boot-heel to the topmost wave of his glossy and luxuriant _chevelure_, the severest critic of the mode would in vain have sought an imperfection. Born, bred, and polished in the genial atmosphere of the noble faubourg, he was a credit to his club, the admiration of the vulgar, the pet of a circle of exclusive and aristocratic dames, whose approving verdict is fashionable fame. His neighbour in the stalls, some years older than himself, was scarcely less correct in externals, although bearing his leonine honours much more carelessly. Like Arthur, he was a very handsome man, but his pale face and fair mustache contrasted with the florid cheek and dark hair of his companion. The Austrian baron Ernest von Steinfeld had acquired, by long and frequent residences in Paris, rights to Parisian naturalisation. He had first visited the French capital in a diplomatic capacity, and, after abandoning that career, had spent a part of every year there as regularly as any native _habitué_ of the club Grammont, the Chantilly race-course, and the Bois de Boulogne. Although a German and a baron, he was neither coarse, nor stupid, nor smoky. He did not carry a tobacco-pipe in his pocket, or get muddled at dinner, or spit upon the floor, or participate in any other of the nastinesses common to the majority of his tribe. A nobleman in Austria, he would have been accounted a gentleman, and a highly bred one, in any country in the world. He was of old family, had been much about courts, held a military rank, possessed a castle and fine estate in the Tyrol, mortgaged to the very last _zwanziger_ of their value, was somewhat _blasé_ and troubled with the spleen, and considerably in debt, both in Vienna and Paris. He had arrived in the latter capital but a fortnight previously, after nearly a year's absence, had established himself in a small but elegant house in a fashionable quarter, and as he still rode fine horses, dressed and dined well, played high and paid punctually, nobody suspected how near he was to the end of his cash and credit; and that he had sacrificed the last remnant of his disposable property to provide ammunition for another campaign in Paris--a campaign likely to be final, unless a wealthy heiress, a prize in the lottery, or an unexpected legacy, came in the nick of time to repair his shattered fortunes.

The second act of the opera was over. The applause, again renewed, had again subsided, and the hum of conversation replaced the crash of the noisy orchestra, the warbling of Duprez, and the passionate declamation of Madame Stolz. The house was very full; the boxes were crowded with elegantly dressed women, a few of them really pretty, a good many appearing so by the grace of gas, rouge, and costume. The curtain was no sooner down than de Mellay, compelled by the despotism of the pit to silence during the performance, dashed off at a colloquial canter, scattering, for his companion's benefit, a shower of criticisms, witticisms, and scandal, for which he found abundant subjects amongst his acquaintances in the theatre, and to which the baron listened with the curled lip and faint smile of one for whose palled palate caviar no longer has flavour, scarcely vouchsafing an occasional monosyllable or brief sentence when Arthur's gossip seemed to require reply. His eyes wandered round the house, their vision aided by the double glasses of one of those tremendous opera-telescopes by whose magnifying powers, it is said, the incipient wrinkle and the borrowed tint are infallibly detected, and the very _tricot_ of Taglioni is converted into a cobweb. Presently he touched the arm of Arthur, who had just commenced an animated ocular flirtation with a blue-eyed belle in a stage-box. The baron called his attention to a box on the opposite side of the theatre.

"There is a curious group," he said.

"Oh, yes," replied de Mellay carelessly, levelling his glass for a moment in the direction pointed out. "The Fatellos." And he resumed his mute correspondence with the dame of the azure eyes.

Steinfeld remained for a short space silent, with the thoughtful puzzled air of a man who suspects he has forgotten something he ought to remember; but his efforts of memory were all in vain, and he again interrupted Arthur's agreeable occupation.

"Whom did you say?" he inquired; indicating, by a glance rather than by a movement, the group that had riveted his attention.

"The Fatellos," replied de Mellay, with a sort of surprise. "But, pshaw! I forget. You were at Venice last carnival, and they have not been twelve months at Paris. You have still to learn the affecting romance of Sigismund and Catalina: how the red knight from Franconie did carry off the Paynim's daughter,--his weapons adapted to the century--bank-notes and bright doubloons, in lieu of couched lance and trenchant blade. Why, when they arrived, all Paris talked of them for three days, and might have talked longer, had not Admiral Joinville brought over from Barbary two uncommonly large baboons, which diverted the public attention. They call them beauty and the beast--the Fatellos, I mean, not the baboons."

The persons who had attracted Steinfeld's notice, and elicited this uncomplimentary tirade from the volatile viscount, occupied one of the best boxes in the theatre. In front were two ladies, likely to be the more remarked from the contrast their appearance offered with the Parisian style of beauty. Their jet-black hair, large almond-shaped eyes, and complexion of a rich glowing olive, betrayed their southern origin. Behind them sat a man of five-and-thirty or forty; a tall, high-shouldered, ungainly figure, with a profusion of reddish hair, and a set of Calmuck features of repulsive ugliness. His face was of an unhealthy paleness, excepting about the nose and cheekbones, which were blotched and heated; and the harsh and obstinate expression of his physiognomy was ill redeemed by the remarkably quick and penetrating glance of his small keen gray eyes.

"Do you mean to say yonder ungainly boor is the husband of one of those two beautiful women, who look as if they had stepped out of a legend of the Alhambra, or of a vintage-piece by Leopold Robert?"

"Certainly--husband of one, brother-in-law of the other. But I will tell you the whole story. Sigismund Fatello is one of those men born with a peculiar genius for money-getting, who, if deposited at the antipodes without a shoe to their foot, or a sou in their pocket, would end by becoming _millionnaires_. Although little heard of in good society till a year ago, he has long been well known on the Bourse, and in foreign capitals, as a bold financier and successful speculator. Two years ago he had occasion to go to the south of Spain, to visit mines offered by the Spanish government as security for the loan of two or three of his millions. Amongst other places he visited Seville, and was there introduced to Don Geronimo Gomez Garcia Gonfalon, (and a dozen other names besides,) a queer old hidalgo, descended from Boabdil of the Bloody Crescent, or some such Moorish potentate. The don dwelt in the shadow of the Giralda, and possessed two daughters reputed fair;--you see them there--judge for yourself. With one of these Fatello fell desperately in love, and asked her in marriage. The lady, who had no wish to abandon her native land for the society of so ugly and unpleasant a helpmate, demurred. But the suitor was urgent and the papa peremptory. Old Boabdil had an immense opinion of Fatello, was dazzled by his wealth and financial reputation, and insisted on his daughter's marrying him, vowing that he himself was poor as a poet, and that if she refused she should go to a nunnery. After the usual amount of tears, threats, and promises, the marriage took place. The descendant of the Saracen made an excellent bargain for his child. Fatello, infatuated by his passion, would have agreed to any conditions, and made immense settlements on the beautiful Catalina. His father-in-law, like an old semi-African hunks as he was, pleaded poverty, hard times, forced contributions, and so forth, as excuses for giving his daughter no other portion than a few rather remarkable diamonds, and some antiquated plate dating from the kings of Granada, and better suited for a Moorish museum than a Christian sideboard. Fatello, whose dealings with the Spanish government had given him no very exalted idea of the opulence of Spanish subjects, cared not for the old boy's maravedis, and credited his plea of poverty. A few weeks afterwards, Fatello and his wife being still in Seville, Boabdil retired for his usual siesta, but not reappearing at the usual hour, a servant went to awaken him, and found him purple with apoplexy. The unfortunate Saracen never spoke again. The next day he was buried, (they lose no time in those warm latitudes); and behold, when the will was opened, he had left upwards of three millions of reals to his disconsolate daughters--about four hundred thousand francs to each of them. When the decencies had been observed in the way of mourning, and Fatello had finished his affairs, he brought his wife and her sister to Paris, took a magnificent hotel in the Faubourg St Honoré, and gave Lucullian dinners, and entertainments such as are read of in the Arabian Nights, but rarely seen in the nineteenth century."

"And were his fêtes well attended?"

"Not quite immediately. At first everybody asked who this Mr Fatello was, and nobody could tell. All sorts of queer stories were got up about him. Some said he was a Polish Jew, formerly well known in Prague, and who had commenced his fortune by attending horse-fairs. Others,--misled by his name, which has an odd Italian sound--swore he was a Lombard, continuing the financial and speculative traditions of his race. He himself claims to be of a good Alsatian family; and I believe the truth is, that his father was a small proprietor in a northern department, who sent his son to Paris, as a boy, to seek his fortune, which, by virtue of industry and arithmetic, he has been lucky enough to find. But people got tired of asking _who_, and changed the interrogation to _what_. This was much more easily answered--'The signature of Sigismund Fatello is worth millions upon every Exchange in Europe,' was the prompt reply. You know our good Parisians, or rather, you know the world in general. If John Law, or Dr Faustus, returned upon earth, with wealth proceeding from the devil or a swindle, and gave banquets and balls, their rooms would not long be empty. No more were those of Fatello, against whom, however, nothing improper was ever substantiated, except a want of ancestors,--a venial offence, in these days, to be charged against a millionnaire! With a citizen king, and Jews in the chamber, _or_ upon _argent_ is the truest blazonry, my word for it."

"By their assistance, then, he has got into good society?" said Steinfeld.

"Into almost the best. He has not made much progress beyond the Seine; but on this side the water, he is every where in good odour. They make much of him at the Tuileries and in diplomatic circles; and in the Chaussée d'Antin, amongst the aristocracy of finance, his money gives him right to a high place. And if he plays the Amphitryon this winter in the style he did the last, there is no saying whether some of our stiff-necked countesses of the _vieille roche_ may not relent, and honour his halls with their transcendental presence. His entertainments of all kinds are quite superlative; and if he be a plebeian and a brute, his wife and sister, on the other hand, are graceful as gazelles, and date from the deluge. He is an ugly-looking monster, certainly," added the handsome viscount; "but fortune has atoned for nature's stinginess. A man may forget his resemblance to a chimpanzee, when he has millions in his strong box, one of the finest houses, and best filled stables, and prettiest wives in Paris,--when he possesses strength and health, and has every prospect of living long to enjoy the goods the gods have showered upon him."

"Wrong in the last particular,--quite wrong, my dear viscount," said a bland and unctuous voice behind de Mellay. The young men turned and found themselves face to face with a comely middle-aged personage, whose smug costume of professional black was relieved by a red ribbon in the button-hole, and who, gliding into the stall in their rear, whilst they were engrossed with their conversation, had overheard its latter sentences.

"Ha! doctor," exclaimed the viscount, "you here, and eaves-dropping! How am I wrong, most sapient and debonair of Galens?"

Dr Pilori was a physician in high practice, and of a class not uncommon in Paris,--at once a man of pleasure and a votary of science. With a fair share of talent and an inordinate one of self-conceit, he had pushed himself forward in his profession, applying himself, in conformity with the Parisian rage for rage for _spécialités_, particularly to one class of complaint. The lungs were the organ he had taken under his special protection: his word was law in all cases of pulmonary disease. He was physician to an hospital, member of the Legion of Honour, and of innumerable learned societies; his portrait graced the shop-windows of medical booksellers, whilst his works, on maladies of the lungs, occupied a prominent place on their shelves. His patients were numerous and his fees large. So far the man of science. The man of pleasure occupied a gorgeous apartment in the vicinity of the Madeleine; gave smart and frequent soirées, (as one means of increasing his connexion,) where singers of the first water gave their notes in payment of his advice. He was frequently at the opera,--occasionally at the Café de Paris,--lived on bad terms with his wife, and on good ones with a ballet-dancer, and was in request as an attendant at duels amongst the young dandies of the clubs, with most of whom he was on a footing of familiarity amounting almost to intimacy.

"How am I wrong, doctor?" repeated de Mellay.

"In your prediction of Fatello's longevity. Of course it is of him you speak?"

"Of no other. What ails him?"

"He is dying of consumption," gravely replied Pilori.

The viscount laughed incredulously, and even Steinfeld could not restrain a smile, so little appearance was there of a consumptive habit in the robust frame, and coarse, rough physiognomy of the financier.

"Laugh if you please, young gentlemen," said the doctor. "It is no laughing matter for Monsieur Fatello, I can tell you. His life is not worth a year's purchase."

"You have been prescribing for him then, doctor," said Arthur maliciously.

"I have," said the physician, suffering the hit to pass unnoticed. "No longer ago than yesterday he consulted me for a trifling indisposition, and, in studying his idiosyncrasy, I detected the graver disease. What do you think he called me in for? I ought not to tell these things, but the joke is too good to keep. He was annoyed about the blotches on his face--anxious for a clear complexion. In what strange places vanity finds a corner! Poor fellow! he little thinks how soon the worms will be at work upon his cuticle."

"You did not tell him, then?" said de Mellay, still doubtful of the doctor's sincerity, and with a sort of shudder at his dissecting-room style.

"What was the use? The seeds of decay are too deeply set to be eradicated by the resources of art. Although to a non-medical eye he presents little appearance of pulmonary derangement, the malady has already taken firm hold. Probably it is hereditary. It advances slowly but surely, and will not be turned aside. The forms of that terrible disease are many and various, from the _pulmonia fulminante_ of Spain, and the _galloping consumption_ of our island neighbours, to those more tedious varieties whose ravages extend over years, to kill as surely at last. But I do not tell you that I _shall_ not inform M. Fatello of his condition. It is our duty to strive to the last, even when we have no hope but in a miracle. I shall see him to-morrow and break the matter to him."

"And send him to Italy or Madeira, I suppose," said Steinfeld, with an appearance of greater interest than he had previously taken in the conversation.

"What for? As well let him die in Paris, where he will at least have all the alleviations the resources of art and high civilisation can afford. But enough of the subject. And you, young gentlemen, say nothing of what I have told you, or you will damage my reputation for discretion."

The rise of the curtain put a period to the conversation, and, before the act was over, a box-keeper delivered a letter to Dr Pilori, who, after reading it, rose with a certain air of importance and solicitude, and hurried out of the theatre,--his sortie provoking a smile amongst some of the habitual frequenters of the stalls, who were accustomed to see this manœuvre repeated with a frequency that gave it the air of an advertisement. The opera over, Steinfeld and de Mellay left the house together, and, whilst driving along the boulevard, the sentence of death pronounced so positively by Pilori upon Fatello, was the subject of their conversation. The viscount was incredulous, took it for a hoax, and would have amused the club by its repetition, and by a burlesque of Pilori's dogmatical and pompous tone, had not Steinfeld urged him to be silent on the subject, lest he should injure the indiscreet physician. Arthur promised to say nothing about it, and soon forgot the whole affair in the excitement of a _bouillotte_-table. Steinfeld, equally reserved, neither forgot the doctor's prophecy, nor doubted the conviction that dictated it. De Mellay's gossip about the Fatellos had doubtless excited his curiosity, and given him a wish to know them,--for, two days afterwards, his elegant _coupé_ drove into the court of their hotel, and a dandified secretary of legation presented, in due form, the Baron Ernest von Steinfeld to the wealthy financier and his handsome wife and sister.

CHAP. II.--THE MASQUERADE.

Three months had elapsed, and Paris was in full carnival. Since the beginning of the year, the town had been kept in a state of unusual excitement by the anticipation of a ball, for which the rich and fashionable Countess de M---- had issued invitations to her immense circle of friends and acquaintances. The position of the countess--who, herself the daughter of an illustrious house, and reckoning amongst her ancestors and their alliances more than one sovereign prince and constable of France, had married a man enriched and ennobled by Napoleon--gave her peculiar facilities for collecting around her all that was distinguished and fashionable in Paris, and for blending the various coteries into which political differences, as much as pride of descent on the one hand, and pride of purse on the other, split the higher circles of Parisian society. Her invitations included stiff-necked legitimists from the dull but dignified streets of St Germain's faubourg, noble as a La Tremouille or a Montmorency, and still sulking against the monarchy of the 7th August; wealthy _parvenus_ from the Chaussée d'Antin, military nobles of imperial fabrication, Russian princes, English lords, Spanish grandees, diplomatists by the dozen, and a prince or two of the reigning family. Under ordinary circumstances, Madame de M---- might have hesitated to bring together so heterogeneous an assemblage--to have mingled in the same saloons all these conflicting vanities, opinions, and prejudices; but the character of her entertainment removed the inconveniences of such confrontation. It was no ordinary ball or common-place rout of which the palatial mansion of the countess was upon this occasion to be the scene. She had conceived the bold idea of resuscitating, upon a large scale, an amusement which in Paris has long since degenerated into vulgar license and drunken saturnalia. Her entertainment was to be a masquerade, to which no one was to come with uncovered face or in ordinary costume. A mask and a disguise were as essential to obtain entrance, as was the ticket of admission sent to each individual invited, and which was to be delivered up at the door, accompanied by the holder's engraved visiting card. This precaution was to guard against the recurrence of an unpleasant incident that had occurred two years previously at a minor entertainment of similar character, when two ingenious professors of legerdemain, better known to the police than to the master of the house, found their way into the ball-room under the convenient covering of dominos, and departed, before their presence was discovered, carrying with them a varied assortment of watches, purses, and jewellery.

The night of the much talked-of fête had arrived; the tailors, milliners, and embroiderers, who, for a month past, had slaved in the service of the invited, had brought home the results of their labours: the fashionable hairdressers had had a hard day's work--some hundreds of wreaths and nosegays, which in June would have been beautiful, and in January seemed miraculous, and whose aggregate cost was a comfortable year's income, had been composed by the tasteful fingers of the Parisian flower-girls. The hour was at hand, and many a fair bosom palpitated with pleasurable anticipations. The hotel of the rich Fatello, as the successful speculator was usually called, had its share of the bustle of preparation; but at last, knotty questions of costume were satisfactorily settled, and the ladies committed themselves to the hands of their tire-women. In his library sat Sigismund Fatello, opening a pile of notes and letters that had accumulated there since afternoon. Some he read and put carefully aside; to others he scarcely vouchsafed a glance; whilst a third class were placed apart for perusal at greater leisure. At last, he opened one by whose contents he was strangely moved, for, on reading them, he started and turned pale, as if stung by an adder. Passing his hand over his eyes, as though to clear his vision, he stood up and placed the paper in the very strongest glare of the powerful Carcel lamp illuminating the room. A second time he read, and his agitation visibly increased. Its cause was a small note, containing but four lines, written in a feigned hand. It was an anonymous letter, striking him in his most vulnerable point. Again and again he perused it, striving to recognise the handwriting, or conjecture the author. All his efforts were in vain. Once, inspired by his good genius, he crushed the treacherous paper in his hand, and approached the fire-place to destroy it in the flames. But, as he drew near the logs that glowed and crackled on the hearth, his pace became slower and slower, until he finally stood still, smoothed the crumpled paper, and once more devoured its contents. Then he walked several times up and down the apartment, with a hurried step. The three months that had elapsed since Arthur de Mellay and Baron Steinfeld had met in the stalls at the opera, had not passed over the head of Fatello without producing a certain change in his appearance. He was thinner and paler, his eyes were more sunken, and a dark line was pencilled beneath them. The change, however, was not such as an indifferent person would notice; it might proceed from many causes--from mental labour, uneasiness, or grief, as well as from bodily disease--the idea of which latter was unlikely to enter the head of a careless observer of his massive frame and features, and of the general appearance of great muscular strength, still remarkable in the ill-favoured financier. Now, however, he was unusually pale and haggard. The letter he still held in his hand had worked upon him like a malevolent charm, hollowing his cheek and wrinkling his brow. For nearly half an hour he continued his monotonous walk, alternately slackening and accelerating his pace. At times he would come to a momentary halt, with the absent air of one absorbed in working out a puzzling problem. At last he opened a secretaire, touched a spring which made a secret drawer fly open, placed in this drawer the letter that had so greatly disturbed him, closed the desk, and, lighting a taper, took the direction of his wife's sitting-room, in the opposite wing of the hotel.

Madame Fatello and Mademoiselle Sebastiana Gonfalon were equipped for the ball and in readiness to depart. Between the two sisters, in whose ages there was a difference of two years, so strong a resemblance existed that they frequently were taken for twins. Exactly of the same stature, they had the same large dark eyes, abundant hair, and brown tint of skin, and the same mouth, not very small, but beautiful in form, and adorned with teeth of dazzling whiteness. Both had the grace and fascination for which their countrywomen are renowned. The chief difference between them was in expression. Catalina was the more serious of the two: her gravity sometimes verged upon sullenness, and this was especially observable since she had been compelled to a marriage repugnant to her feelings, but which she had lacked energy and courage to resist. Her father would have found it a far less easy task to force Sebastiana to a union opposed to her inclinations. As high-spirited as her sister was irresolute, Mademoiselle Gonfalon was one of those persons whose obstinacy is increased by every attempt at coercion. Laughing and lively, amidst all her gay coquetries there still was a decision in her classically moulded chin and slightly compressed lip, and a something clandestine but resolute in her eye, which a physiognomist would have interpreted as denoting a degree of intelligence and a passionate strength of character denied by nature to her feebler sister. Upon this evening, however, it might have been thought the two young women had exchanged characters. Sebastiana, in general all smiles and sprightliness, was thoughtful and preoccupied, almost anxious; whilst the listless and melancholy Catalina had an unusual appearance of gaiety and animation. Her cheek was flushed, her eyes were brilliant, and she looked repeatedly at a jewelled bijou-watch, as though she would fain have advanced the hour at which she could with propriety make her entrance into Madame de M----'s saloons.

The door opened and Fatello came in. By a powerful exertion of that self-command which he possessed in no ordinary degree, he had banished from his countenance nearly every trace of recent agitation. He was perhaps a shade paler than usual, but his brow was unclouded, and his uncouth countenance was lighted up by the most agreeable smile it could assume.

"So, ladies," he said, with a liveliness that sat but clumsily upon him; "you are armed for conquest. Accept my compliments on the excellent taste of your costumes. They are really charming. If you are detected, it will hardly be by your dress. Those loose robes and that convenient cowl are the best possible disguises."

"All the better!" cried Sebastiana. "Nothing like the dear black domino, under which you can be impertinent as you like, with scarce a possibility of discovery. There will be fifty such dresses as ours in the room."

"No doubt of it," replied her brother-in-law, thoughtfully. And his piercing green-gray eye scanned the dominos that shrouded the graceful figures of his wife and her sister. They were of plain black satin; but the art of the maker had contrived to impart elegance to the costume which, of all others, generally possesses it the least. The two dresses were exactly alike, except that Catalina's was tied at the wrists with lilac ribbons, whilst nothing broke the uniform blackness of her sister's garb. Black gloves and masks, and two bouquets of choice exotics, the masterpieces of the celebrated bouquetière of the Madeleine boulevard, completed the ladies' equipment.

"I am sorry," said Fatello, "to deny myself the pleasure of accompanying you to the Countess's fête; but I am behindhand with my correspondence, and have received important letters, which I must answer by the morning's post. My night, a part of it at least, will be passed at the desk instead of in the ball-room."

There was nothing in this announcement to excite surprise; the tone and manner in which it was made were perfectly natural; but, nevertheless, Sebastiana Gonfalon darted a keen quick glance at her brother-in-law, as though seeking in his words a double meaning or disguised purpose. Madame Fatello showed neither surprise nor disappointment, but, approaching a table, she took from a costly basket of gold filagree, overflowing with cards and invitations, an envelope containing three tickets for the masquerade. Selecting two of them, she threw the third into the basket, and again looked at her watch. At that moment the door opened, and her carriage was announced.

"Come, Sebastiana," said Madame Fatello, impatiently. "Good-night, M. Fatello." And, with a slight bow to her husband, she passed into the ante-room.

"Good-night, Sigismund," said Sebastiana. "Change your mind and follow us."

"Impossible," said Fatello, with the same smiling countenance as before.

Sebastiana followed her sister. Fatello lingered a few moments in the drawing-room, and then returned to his study. As he entered it, he heard the roll of the carriage-wheels driving out of the court.

The masquerade given by the Countess de M---- was that kind of magnificent and extraordinary entertainment which forms _the_ event of the year in which it occurs; which is long held up as a pattern to gala-givers, and as marking a red-letter epoch in the annals of fashion and pleasure. Nothing was spared to make it in all respects perfect. An entire floor of the Countess's vast mansion had been cleared, for the occasion, of all superfluous furniture; three splendid saloons were appropriated to dancing; two others, equally spacious, to refreshments. In these, the appetites of the guests had been richly catered for. One was the coffee-house, the other the _restaurant_. In the former, on a multitude of small marble tables, a regiment of attentive waiters served ices and sherbets, wine and chocolate, coffee and liqueurs. In the latter, tables were laid for supper, and upon each of them lay a printed bill of fare, where the hungry made their selection from a list of the most delicate dishes, whose appearance followed the order with a celerity that would have done honour to the best-appointed hotel in Paris. A long, wide gallery, and some smaller rooms, were used as a promenade, where the company freely circulated. In a music-hall, a strong party of professional singers kept up an unceasing concert for the entertainment of all comers; and in a chamber fitted up as a tent, an Italian juggler, with peaked beard, and in antique costume of black velvet, performed tricks of extraordinary novelty and ingenuity. Every part and corner of this magnificent suite of apartments was lighted _a giorno_, draped with coloured silks and muslins, and enlivened by a profusion of tall mirrors, multiplying tenfold the fantastical figures of the maskers and the flame of the countless _bougies_. Many hundreds of porcelain vases, containing the choicest plants, forced prematurely into flower, and all remarkable for brilliancy of colour or fragrance of perfume, lined the broad corridors and the recesses of the windows, which latter were further filled by admirably executed transparencies, forming a series of views from the Italian lakes. The whole resembled a scene from fairyland, or an enchanted palace, raised by the wand of some benevolent gnome for the delectation of the sons and daughters of mortality. If the entertainment was of unparalleled magnificence, the appearance of the guests did it no discredit. Tasteful and ingeniously devised costumes crowded the apartments; history and romance had been ransacked for characters; the most costly materials had been lavishly employed in the composition of dresses for that one night's diversion. All was glitter of jewels, wave of plumes, and rustle of rich brocades. In diamonds alone, an emperor's ransom was displayed; and more than one fair masker bore upon her neck and arms, and graceful head, the annual revenue of half-a-dozen German princes.

As Sebastiana had predicted, there was a considerable sprinkling of dominos amongst the motley throng; and as usual, of those who had selected that dress, more favourable to concealment and intrigue than to display of personal graces or costly ornaments, at least one half had preferred black to any other colour. These latter seemed the subject of the particular attention of one of their number, who, soon after twelve o'clock, made his appearance in the ball-room. Impatience to share in the much-talked-of fête, had rendered the invited punctual; by that hour nearly all had arrived, and in such numbers that the rooms, though so large and numerous, were crowded at least as much as was convenient and consistent with circulation. Hence the black domino was frequently impeded in the rapid movements he commenced whenever one of his own species--that is to say, a domino of the same colour--caught his eye, movements which had for their object to meet or overtake the person of garb similar to his own. On such occasions, so great was his impatience, that in a public ball-room he would surely have incurred a quarrel by the somewhat too vigorous use he made of his elbows. But Madame de M----'s well-bred guests merely shrugged their shoulders, and wondered who the _man-ant_ could be who thus imported into their élite society the unceremonious usages of an opera-house masquerade. The black domino heeded not their mute wonderment, nor cared for the unfavourable impression he might leave upon the ribs and the minds of those he jostled. He was evidently looking for somebody, and however discouraging the task of seeking one particular black domino in a crowded masquerade, where there were two or three score of them, he persevered, in spite of repeated disappointments. At last it seemed as if success had rewarded his constancy. With the suddenness and certainty of a well-broken pointer, he came to a dead stop at sight of a black satin domino leaning on the arm of an elegant Hungarian hussar. To the steps of this couple he thenceforward attached himself. Whithersoever they went, he followed, keeping at sufficient distance to prevent their noticing his pursuit; regulating his pace by theirs, but occasionally accelerating it so as to pass them, and lingering for a second when close at their side, as if trying to distinguish the tones of their voices, or to catch a few words of their discourse. Whilst thus engaged, he did not observe that he had himself become an object of attention to a third black domino, who, previously to him, had been dogging, but at greater distance, and with still more precaution than he observed, the steps of the hussar and his companion. The curiosity and caution of domino No. 3, appeared to receive fresh stimulus from the apparition of a rival observer, over whose movements he kept careful watch, but from afar, and concealed as much as possible amongst the crowd, somewhat after the fashion in which the Red Indian observes, from his shelter amidst the trees of the forest, the movements of the hunter, who himself watches from an ambush the course of a herd of deer.

The only portion of the apartments thrown open to the maskers that was not rendered light as day by a profusion of wax candles, was a vast conservatory, the entrance to which was through two large French windows, opening out of one of the dancing rooms. Paved with a mosaic of divers-coloured marbles and fanciful device, it contained a choice collection of exotics and evergreens, of such remarkable size and beauty, that the topmost leaves of many of them rustled against the elevated glass roof. These trees and shrubs were so arranged as to form a sort of miniature labyrinth, upon whose paths a mild light was thrown by lamps of coloured glass suspended to the branches. This illumination, although ample to guide the steps of the promenaders between the verdant and flowering hedges, seemed but a twilight, from its contrast with the broad glare of the adjoining apartments. The change from a strong to a subdued light had been purposely contrived by the judicious arrangers of the fête, as a relief for eyes wearied by the brilliancy of the ball-room. As yet, however, few persons seemed eager for the transition, and the conservatory was little resorted to except at the close of a dance, when its comparatively fresh atmosphere was gladly sought.

Quadrilles had just commenced in all the dancing-rooms, when the Hungarian hussar and his domino, making their way slowly and with some difficulty in rear of the dancers, took refuge in the conservatory from the din of music and pressure of the crowd. They were evidently so absorbed in their conversation, so much alone in the midst of the multitude, that their eternal pursuer ventured unusually near to them, and was close at their heels when they passed through the glass door. Then, instead of continuing to follow them, he struck into another path, which ran nearly parallel to the one they took. On reaching a circle of beautiful arbutus, whose white bells and bright strawberries gleamed like pearls and blood-drops in the light of the purple lamps that hung amongst them, the hussar and his companion paused beside a porphyry basin, supported by a sculptured pedestal of the same material. For a few moments they stood silent, gazing at the goldfish that swam their monotonous circle in the basin; and at the little fountain that spouted up in its centre. Then, leaning upon the edge of the vase, they resumed their conversation in tones less guarded than before, for here they might almost consider themselves alone--the few groups and couples sauntering in the conservatory being too much engrossed in their own discourse to heed that of others. The Hungarian removed his mask, still, however, holding it ready to apply to his face in case of intrusion; whilst the domino contented herself with raising the silken beard of hers, to allow the musical tones proceeding from a pair of rosy and youthful lips to fall more clearly upon her companion's ear. Thus they continued a conversation apparently of deep interest to both, and which they suspended only when some passing party of masks lingered for an instant beside the fountain, until the end of the quadrille brought a throng of dancers into the conservatory. Then they left the place, and sauntered back into the ball-room.

Meanwhile the third domino watched the conservatory doors with a lynx-eyed vigilance worthy a pupil of the celebrated Vidocq. Although the loose black dress might have covered either a short man or a woman of the middle stature, the delicacy of the gloved fingers, and of the tiny foot that peeped from below its border, left little doubt as to the sex of its wearer. From a convenient position on the steps leading up to an orchestra, the fringe of her mask confined by her hand, so as to prohibit even a glimpse of her ivory chin, she subjected to a rigid scrutiny all who issued from the conservatory. Suddenly, from the door nearest to her, the hussar and his companion made their appearance, and, as they passed, she shrouded herself behind the portly figure and sumptuous embroideries of a Venetian doge. Then she resumed her watch, and a minute had not elapsed when she saw the tall black domino, whom she had observed during the evening, re-enter the dancing-room and make his way as fast as the crowd would allow him to the nearest door of exit, with a hurried and irregular step, hardly to be explained otherwise than by sudden illness or violent emotion. She followed him to the head of the staircase, down which he rushed, disappearing at its foot through the crowd of lackeys in the hall. Having seen this, she re-entered the ball-room, sought out the hussar and his companion, and soon afterwards was whirling with the former in the giddy circles of a waltz.

Some hours later, as the Hungarian retired from the ball, almost borne along in the dense stream of masks that now flowed through the rooms, he felt a momentary pressure of his hand. A paper remained in its palm, upon which his fingers mechanically closed. Amidst the ever-moving throng it was impossible to detect the person from whom he had received it. By this time a large portion of the company, oppressed by the heat, had unmasked, but he knew none of the faces he saw around him, whilst of those who had preserved their vizards he could fix on none as object of suspicion. So soon as he could extricate himself from the crowd, he unfolded the paper. It contained the following mysterious words, hastily scrawled with a pencil:--

"One whom you think asleep wakes and watches. He is here; has followed and overheard you, and will seek revenge. Be prepared. Proof is difficult: denial may be safety. Adopt it at all risks. Masked, the sisters are undistinguishable. Credit this warning from a sincere friend."

* * * * *

Thrice the Hungarian perused this mysterious billet; and then, thrusting it into the breast of his richly braided jacket, slowly left the house.

CHAP. III.--THE ACCUSATION.

The house selected by Baron Ernest von Steinfeld, wherein to pass what might possibly be his last season in Paris, was situated in the Rue St Lazare. It was one of those buildings, of frequent occurrence in modern Parisian architecture, which seem intended to gratify the taste of such persons as prefer the English fashion of occupying an entire house, to the French one of dwelling upon a floor. At the bottom of a paved court-yard, around three sides of which was built a large mansion containing many tenants, stood one of those edifices known in French parlance as pavilions--not that they possess a dome, resemble a tent, or, for the most part, have any of the qualities of a summer-house, but because, in Paris, the term "house" is grudgingly bestowed upon a building of less than five stories and thirty or forty rooms. This pavilion had but three stories and a dozen rooms; it was a particularly complete and independent habitation, standing well back from the body of the house, under whose number it was included, and of which, although detached, it was considered to form part; and having two entrances, one through the court, the other from a lane running at right angles with the street. The ground-floor contained, besides a light and commodious vestibule and servant's offices, only one apartment, a handsome dining-room, in which, however, it was impossible, for three quarters of the year, to dine without lamps--the daylight admitted by its one broad window being greatly limited by the walls of a nook of garden, and by the impending branches of a laburnum and acacia, which mingled their boughs in affectionate union, twin lords of a square yard of grass, and of a fathom's length of flower-bed, and in the spring-time rejoiced the inmates of the pavilion with the odorous rustle of their yellow clusters and rose-coloured blossoms. The first floor contained two pleasant drawing-rooms and a boudoir; the second, bath, bed, and dressing rooms. The roof, flat and surrounded by a parapet, commanded a view over the adjacent gardens of an extensive bathing establishment and _maison de santé_, and was no unpleasant resort, on a fine day, for persons desirous to inhale the fresh air, or to scent it with the fumes of Havana's weed. This pavilion, described by the _Petites Affiches_ as _fraîchement décoré_--the said decoration consisting in fresh paint and paper, and in a profusion of that cheerful French luxury, large and excellent mirrors--was rented for six months by Baron Steinfeld, who had hired, for the same period, from a fashionable upholsterer--for a sum which would almost have furnished the house permanently in a plainer manner--a complete set of furniture, against whose perfect elegance and good taste not a syllable could be breathed. His establishment was as correct as his residence. It consisted, in the first place, of a French cook, with whose sauces Arthur de Mellay had repeatedly expressed his willingness to eat a fragment of his father; which offer--considering the worthy count had been a guardsman in the time of Louis XVI., and, consequently, was neither young nor tender--was certainly a high testimonial to the merits of sauce and cook. Then came an Italian valet, quite as skilful a personage in his way as the professor of gastronomic science--speaking three or four languages, accumulating in his own individuality the knowledge and acquirements of a legion of hairdressers, tailors, perfumers, and the like--thoroughly versed in the arcana of the toilet, a secretary in case of need, and a perfect Mercury in matters of intrigue. The third person of Steinfeld's household, the last, and also by much the least--physically speaking, that is to say, but by no means in his own estimation--was one of those miniature tigers, (copied from the English, and essential appendages to the establishment of a Paris lion,) who look as if they had been subjected to that curious Chinese process by which lofty shrubs and forest trees are stunted to dimensions that permit the plantation of a grove in a flower-pot--wizen-faced, top-booted abortions, uniting the mischief and the proportions of a monkey, and frightfully precocious in every species of villany. The house also contained, during the day, an old Frenchwoman, of a species indigenous and confined to Paris--the patient butt of the cook's ill-humours and of the groom's pranks, with bearded chin and slipshod feet, and willing for any sort of dirty work, from the scouring of a kettle to the administration of the remedy renowned in French pharmacy.

It was an hour past noon on the day succeeding the Countess of M----'s masquerade, and Steinfeld sat alone at breakfast. It were more correct to say that he sat at the breakfast table; for the savoury meal before him was still untasted, and he seemed in no haste to attack it. In vain the green oysters from Ostend lay invitingly open, and one of Chevet's pies displayed, through a triangular aperture in its crust, the tender tints of an exquisite _foie-gras_--the result of the martyrdom of some unhappy Strasburg duck; in vain a fragrant steam of truffles oozed from beneath the covers of two silver dishes, fresh from the laboratory of Macedoine the cook, and mingled its odours with the flowery aroma of a bottle of Sauterne, from which Rufini the valet had just extracted the long yellow-sealed cork. Apparently, none of these creature-comforts dwelt in the desires of the baron, who sat sideways to the table, his chin resting on his hand, gazing upon vacancy with an intenseness bespeaking deep preoccupation. One acquainted with Steinfeld's circumstances would have hesitated little in conjecturing the nature of the unpleasant reflections in which he seemed absorbed. They might very well have for motive the unprosperous state of his exchequer, the heavy incumbrances weighing upon the hereditary acres, the approaching decease of that convenient but fickle ally, on whose succour half the world exist, and whose name is Credit. The baron had been any thing but a prudent man. Too careless of the future, he had neglected fortune when she offered herself to his embrace; and now she revenged herself by averting her countenance. Of high descent and fair estate, handsome person and fascinating manners, for some years Steinfeld might have aspired to the hand of almost any heiress in Vienna or Paris. Numerous were the matrimonial overtures that had been more or less directly made to him, at a time when, in love with his bachelorhood, and celebrated for his _bonnes fortunes_, he looked upon the bonds of Hymen as the most oppressive of fetters, intolerable even when sheathed in gold. The matchmakers, repulsed without exception, at last renounced all further attempts upon the hand of the handsome Austrian--as Steinfeld was generally called in Paris--and declared him an incorrigible partisan of celibacy. To the unmolested enjoyment of his bachelor bliss the baron was for some years left, until one morning he awoke to the disagreeable consciousness that profuse expenditure had done its work, and that ruin or a rich marriage were the only alternatives left him. He was fully alive to the difficulties placed in the way of the latter by the change in his circumstances. His ancient name and personal advantages remained, but his fair estate was in the hands of the harpies; and however disposed romantic young ladies might be to overlook this misfortune, prudent papas would deem it a serious stumbling-block. Then it was that, roused by horrid visions of approaching poverty from his usual state of happy _insouciance_, the baron gathered together the relics of his past opulence, squeezed and exhausted every remaining resource, and, assuming a bold front against bad fortune, returned to Paris, with much the feelings of the soldier who screws up all his energies to conquer or to die. It was no apprehension, however, as to the result of this final struggle--no nervous trepidation arising from the imminence of his situation, that now clouded Steinfeld's brow and spoiled his appetite. On the contrary, he deemed victory secure, and beheld himself, in no remote perspective, emerging triumphantly from his difficulties, even as a snake, casting its shabby skin, reappears in glittering scales of gold. He had not wasted the three months he had passed in Paris, and was well satisfied with the result of his exertions. His present uneasiness had a different origin--one similar to the cause by which, some fifteen hours previously, we saw Sigismund Fatello so deeply moved. The baron turned and twisted in his hand a letter, to whose contents he again and again recurred, pondering them intently. Like that received by the banker, the billet was anonymous; like his, it contained but three or four lines; but, despite its brevity and want of authenticity, it proved, on the part of the writer, whoever that might be, an acquaintance with the baron's most important secret, that did not fail greatly to disquiet him. Who had thus detected what he deemed so surely concealed? He strained his eyes and memory, in vain endeavouring to recognise the handwriting; and, more than once, fancying he had done so, he fetched notes and letters from a desk in the adjoining boudoir, to compare them with the anonymous epistle. But the comparison always dissipated his suspicion. Then, taking a pen, and a diminutive sheet of amber-scented paper, he began a note, but tore the paper after writing only three words, and threw the fragments impatiently into the fire. Just then the pavilion bell rang loudly; the next minute there was a knock at the room door, and Celestin the tiger made his appearance, bearing a card inscribed with the name of M. Sigismund Fatello, and an inquiry whether Monsieur le Baron was at home and visible.

On reading the banker's name, Steinfeld made a slight and sudden movement, almost amounting to a start, but, instantly recovering himself, he bade his groom show the visitor up stairs. At the same time he hastily seated himself, ordered Rufini to take off the covers, poured some wine into a glass, and helped himself from the first dish that came to hand; so that when Fatello, ushered in by the groom, entered the apartment, he had all the appearance of one whose whole faculties were concentrated, for the time being, in the enjoyment of an excellent meal. Rising from his chair, with an air of jovial cordiality, he hastened to welcome the banker.

"An unexpected pleasure, my dear Fatello," said he. "What favourable chance procures me so early a visit? You are come to breakfast, I hope. Rufini, a knife and fork for M. Fatello."

"I have breakfasted, M. le Baron," replied Fatello, with a dryness amounting almost to incivility. "If my call is untimely, my business is pressing----and private," he added, with a glance at the Italian, who stood in respectful immobility behind his master's chair.

"Leave the room, Rufini," said Steinfeld.

The well-drilled valet bowed in silence, and glided noiselessly from the apartment.

"Now then, my good friend," said the Austrian, in the same gay offhand tone as before, "I am all ear and attention. What is up? Nothing bad, I hope; nothing so serious as to spoil my appetite. I have heard a proverb condemning discourse between a full man and a hungry one."

Fatello made no immediate reply. There was something very peculiar in his aspect. His lips were pale and compressed, and his brows slightly knit. He seemed constraining himself to silence until he felt he could speak calmly on a subject which roused anger and indignation in his breast. Whilst seemingly engrossed by his breakfast, Steinfeld lost not a look or motion of his visitor's, not a line of his physiognomy, or a glance of his small piercing eye. And the baron, notwithstanding his assumed careless levity of manner, did not feel altogether at his ease.

"You have not turned conspirator, I hope," said he, when Fatello, after a short but awkward pause, still remained silent. "No Henri-quinquist plot, or plan to restore the glorious days of the guillotine and the Goddess of Liberty? No, no; a Crœus of your calibre, my dear Fatello, would not mix in such matters. Your plotters are hungry dogs, with more debts than ducats. Talking of hunger--I am grieved you have breakfasted. This mushroom omelet does honour to Macedoine."

The baron would have talked on,--for at that moment any sort of babble seemed to him preferable to silence. But Fatello, who had not heard a word he had said, suddenly rose from his seat, rested his hands upon the table, and leaning forward, with eyes sternly fixed upon Steinfeld, uttered these remarkable words, in tones rendered harsh and grating by the effort that made them calm:

"Monsieur le Baron de Steinfeld, you are courting my wife!"

The most expert physiognomist would have failed to detect upon the countenance of the ex-diplomatist any other expression than one of profound astonishment, tinged by that glow of indignation an innocent man would be likely to feel at an unfounded accusation, abruptly and brutally brought. After sustaining for a few seconds Fatello's fixed and angry gaze, his features relaxed into a slightly contemptuous smile.

"The jest is surely in questionable taste, my dear M. Fatello. And the severity of your countenance might alarm a man with a conscience less clear than mine."

"I jest not, sir, with my honour and happiness," retorted Fatello, with a rude fierceness that brought a flush to the baron's cheek--a flame of anger which the next moment, however, dispelled.

"Then, my dear M. Fatello," said Steinfeld, "since, instead of a bad jest, you mean sober earnest, I can only say you are grossly misinformed, and that your suspicions are as injurious to Madame Fatello, as your manner of expressing them is insulting to myself."

"I have no suspicions," replied Fatello, "but a certainty."

"Impossible!" said the baron. "Name my accuser. He shall account for the base calumny."

"He desires no better," replied Fatello, sternly. "I myself accuse you. No slanderous tongues, but my own ears, are evidence against you. And yourself, sir, shall confess what you now so stubbornly deny. You were at last night's masquerade."

"I was so."

"In hussar uniform--crimson vest and white pelisse."

Steinfeld bowed assent. "The uniform of the regiment to which I formerly belonged."

"A black domino was on your arm."

"_Ma foi!_" cried the baron, with a laugh that sounded rather forced, "if you demand an account of all the masks I walked and danced with, I shall hardly be able to satisfy you. Dominos there were, doubtless; and, of all colours, black amongst the rest."

"You equivocate, sir," said Fatello, angrily. "I will aid your memory. The domino I mean was your companion early in the night. The domino I mean danced once with you, (a waltz,) and afterwards walked with you through the rooms, in deep conversation. The domino I mean stood with you for more than ten minutes beside the fountain in the conservatory. The domino I mean was my wife; and you, Baron Steinfeld, are a villain!"

During this singular conversation Steinfeld had sat, leaning back in his large elbow-chair, in an attitude of easy indifference--one slippered foot thrown carelessly over the other, and his hands thrust into the pockets of his damask dressing-gown. On receiving this last outrageous insult, his lip blanched with passion, his whole person quivered as with an electric shock, and he half rose from his semi-recumbent position. But the baron was a man of vast self-command; one of those cool-headed cool-hearted egotists who rarely act upon impulse, or compromise their interests by ill-timed impetuosity. The first choleric movement, prompting him to throw Fatello down stairs, was checked with wonderful promptitude, and with little appearance of effort. In reality, however, the effort was a violent one. As a soldier at the triangles bites a bullet with the rage of pain, so Steinfeld clenched his hands till the strong sharp nails almost cut into the palm. As he did so, a paper in his pocket rustled against his knuckles. It was the note so mysteriously conveyed to him at the masquerade, and which he had been pondering when Fatello was announced. To one so quick-witted, the mere touch of the paper was as suggestive as a volume of sage counsels. In an instant every sign of annoyance disappeared from his features; he rose quietly from his seat, and with easy dignity and an urbane countenance, confronted Fatello, who stood gloomy and lowering before the fire.

"I see, M. Fatello," he said, "that you are bent upon our cutting each other's throats; but, strange as it may seem, after the terms you have employed, I still hope to avert the unpleasant necessity. For one moment moderate your language, and give me time for brief explanation. If I rightly understand you, it is from your own observations you thus accuse me; and I presume you did me the honour of a personal surveillance at last night's ball?"

Fatello, his violence checked for the moment from further outbreak by the baron's courtesy and coolness, made a gesture of sullen assent.

"And that you overheard a part, but not the whole, of my conversation with the black domino in question?"

"I heard enough, and too much," replied Fatello, with a savage scowl at his interlocutor. "This is idle talk, mere gain of time. Baron Steinfeld!" cried the banker, in a voice that again rose high above its usual pitch, "you are----"

"Stop!" interrupted Steinfeld, speaking very quickly, but with an extraordinary and commanding calmness, which again had its effect. "Descend not to invective, M. Fatello. There is always time for violence. Hear reason. You are in error, an error easily explained. I certainly saw Madame Fatello at the ball, saw and spoke with her--patience, sir, and hear me! But the domino, of my conversation with whom you heard a part, was _not_ Madame Fatello, but Mademoiselle Gonfalon. You take little interest in the frivolities of a masquerade, and are possibly unaware that the two ladies' dresses were exactly similar. You can have heard our conversation but imperfectly, or you would not have wronged me by this suspicion."

Whilst uttering these last sentences, Steinfeld redoubled the keenness of the scrutiny with which he regarded the banker's uncomely and agitated physiognomy. But although piquing himself, as a former diplomatist, on skill in reading men's thoughts through their faces, he was unable to decipher the expression of Fatello's countenance on receiving this plausible explanation of the error into which he had been led by the sisters' identity of costume. As he proceeded with it, the banker's lips, slightly parting, gave his face an air of stupefied wonderment, in addition to its previously inflamed and angry aspect. When Steinfeld concluded an explanation uttered with every appearance of sincerity and candour, and in that flexible and affable tone which, when he chose to employ it, imparted to his words a peculiarly seductive and persuasive charm, Fatello's lips were again firmly closed, and curled with a curious and inexplicable smile. This faded away; he struck his left hand against his forehead, and remained for some moments plunged in thought, as if he hastily retraced in his memory what he had heard the night before, to see how it tallied with the explanation just given him. Thus, at least, Steinfeld interpreted his manner; and although the Austrian's countenance preserved its serenity, his heart throbbed violently against his ribs during the banker's brief cogitation. The result of this was evidently satisfactory to Fatello, from whose brow, when his hand again dropped by his side, the lowering cloud had disappeared, replaced by affability and regret.

"I see," he said, with better grace than might have been expected from him, and taking a step towards Steinfeld, "that nothing remains for me but to implore your pardon, baron, for my unwarrantable suspicions, and for the harsh and unbecoming expressions into which they betrayed me. Jealousy is an evil counsellor, and blinds to the simplest truths. I scarce dare hope you will forgive my intemperate conduct, without exacting the hostile meeting for which I was just now as eager as I at present am to avoid it. If you insist, I must not refuse, but I give you my word that if I have a duel with you to-day, nothing shall induce me to depart from the defensive."

"I should be unreasonable," replied Steinfeld graciously, "if I exacted ampler satisfaction than this handsome apology, for what, after all, was no unnatural misconception. Ten years ago, I might have been more punctilious, but after three or four encounters of the kind, a duel avoided, when its real motive is removed, is a credit to a man's good sense, and no slur upon his courage."

"No one will ever attack yours, my dear baron," said Fatello. "I only hope you will always keep what has passed between us this morning as profound a secret as I, for my own sake, certainly shall do. I am by no means disposed to boast of my part in the affair."

Steinfeld bowed politely, and the two men exchanged, with smiles upon their faces, a cordial grasp of the hand.

"Out of evil cometh good," said the banker sententiously, subsiding upon the silken cushions of a _causeuse_ that extended its arms invitingly at the chimney-corner. "I am delighted to find that the leaden bullet I anticipated exchanging with you is likely to be converted into a golden ring, establishing so near a connexion between us as to render our fighting a duel one of the least probable things in the world. My dear baron, I shall rejoice to call you brother-in-law."

"It would be a great honour for me," replied Steinfeld, "but you over-rate the probability of my enjoying it. Nothing has passed between Mademoiselle Gonfalon and myself to warrant my reckoning on her preference."

"Tush, tush! baron," said Fatello, apparently not heeding, or not noticing the somewhat supercilious turn of Steinfeld's phrases, "you forget the new and not very creditable occupation to which the demons of jealousy and suspicion last night condemned me. You forget that I tracked you in the promenade, and lay in ambush by the fountain, or you would hardly put me off with such tales as these."

The baron winced imperceptibly on being thus reminded how closely his movements had been watched.

"You are evidently new at the profession of a scout," said he jestingly, "or you would have caught more correctly my conversation with your amiable sister-in-law. Mademoiselle Gonfalon is a charming person; the mask gives a certain license to flirtation, and a partial hearing of what passed between us has evidently misled you as to its precise import."

"Not a bit of it!" cried Fatello, with an odd laugh--"I heard better than you think, I assure you; and what I did hear quite satisfied me that you are a smitten man, and that Sebastiana is well disposed to favour your suit."

"I must again protest," said Steinfeld, expressing himself with some embarrassment, "that the thought of becoming Mademoiselle Gonfalon's husband, great as the honour would be, has never yet been seriously entertained by me; and that, however you may have been misled by the snatches of our conversation you overheard, nothing ever passed between us exceeding the limits of allowable flirtation--the not unnatural consequence of Mademoiselle Sebastiana's fascinating vivacity, and of the agreeable footing of intimacy on which, for the last three months, I have found admittance at your hospitable house."

Sigismund Fatello preserved, whilst the baron waded through the intricacies of his artificial and complicated denial, a half-smile of polite but total incredulity.

"My dear baron," said he, gravely, when Steinfeld at last paused, "I am sure you are too honourable a man to trifle with the affections of any woman. I know you as the very opposite character to those heartless and despicable male coquets, who ensnare susceptible hearts for the cruel pleasure of bruising or breaking them, and sacrifice, in their vile egotism, the happiness of others to the indulgence of paltry vanity. I detect the motives of your present reserve, and, believe me, I appreciate their delicacy. Rumour, that eternal and impertinent gossip, has asserted that Baron Ernest von Steinfeld has impaired, by his open hand and pursuit of pleasure, the heritage of his forefathers. I do not mean that this has become matter of common report; but we bankers have opportunities of knowing many things, and can often read in our bill-books and ledgers the histories of families and individuals. In short, it is little matter how I know that your affairs, my dear baron, are less flourishing than they might be, or than you could wish. But this, after all, is an unimportant matter. The dirty acres are still there--the Schloss Steinfeld still stands firm upon its foundation, and though there be a bit of a mortgage on the domain, and some trouble with refractory Jews, it is nothing, I am sure, but what a clear head, and a little ready cash, will easily dispose of."

It was natural to suppose that a lover, whose position on the brink of ruin made him scruple to ask the hand of his mistress of her nearest male relative and protector, and who found his embarrassments suddenly smoothed over and made light of by the very person who might be expected to exaggerate them, would be the last man to place fresh stumbling-blocks on the path to happiness thus unexpectedly cleared before him. Steinfeld, however, appeared little disposed to chime in with the banker's emollient view of his disastrous financial position. With an eagerness that bespoke either the most honourable punctiliousness, or very little anxiety to become the husband of Mademoiselle Gonfalon, he set Fatello right.

"I heartily wish," said he, "matters were no worse than you suppose. You quite underrate my real embarrassments. My estate is mine only nominally; not a farthing it produces comes into my pocket; the very castle and its furniture are pledged; some houses in Vienna, and a few thousand florins of Austrian _rentes_, derived from my mother, melted away years ago; I am deeply in debt, and harassed on all sides by duns and extortioners. I calculated my liabilities the other day--why, I know not, for I have no chance of clearing them--and I found it would require three hundred thousand florins to release my lands and pay my debts. You see, my dear M. Fatello, I am not a very likely match for an heiress."

Fatello had listened with profound attention to the insolvent balance-sheet exhibited by the baron.

"Three hundred thousand florins--six hundred thousand francs," said he, musingly--"allowing for usury and overcharges, might doubtless be got rid of for a hundred thousand less. Well, baron, when Sebastiana marries, she will have more than that tacked to her apron. Her father left her something like half a million, and I have not let the money lie idle. She is a richer woman, by some thousand louis d'ors, than she was at his death. I don't carry her account in my head, but I daresay her fortune would clear your lands, and leave a nice nest-egg besides. And although she certainly might find a husband in better plight as regards money matters, yet, as you are so much attached to each other, and happiness, after all, is before gold, I shall make no difficulties. I noticed the girl was absent and sentimental of late, but never guessed the real cause. Ah, baron! you fascinating dogs have much to answer for!"

Whilst Fatello thus ran on, with, as usual, more bluntness than good breeding, Steinfeld was evidently on thorns; and at the first appearance of a pause in the banker's discourse, he impatiently struck in.

"I must beg your attention, M. Fatello," said he, "whilst I repeat what you evidently have imperfectly understood--that it has never entered my head to gain Mademoiselle Gonfalon's affections, and that I have no reason to believe I should succeed in the attempt. I again repeat that nothing but the most innocent and unimportant flirtation has passed between us. I am deeply sensible of your kind intentions--grateful for your generous willingness to overlook my unfortunate circumstances, and to promote my marriage with your sister-in-law; but, flattering and advantageous as such a union would be to me, I am not certain it would lead to that happiness which you justly deem preferable to wealth. I doubt whether my disposition and that of Mademoiselle Sebastiana would exactly harmonise. Moreover, necessitous though I am, it goes against my pride to owe every thing to my wife. It would pain me to see her dowry swallowed up by my debts. Let us drop the subject, I entreat you. To-morrow you will appreciate and rejoice at my hesitation. I fully comprehend the generous impulse that prompts you. Having done me an injustice, you would compensate me beyond my merits. Thanks, my good friend; but, believe me, if happiness resides not in wealth, neither is it found in hasty or ill-assorted unions. And, to tell you the truth, however politic a rich marriage might be in the present critical state of my affairs, I long ago made a vow against matrimony, which I still hesitate to break."

"You are the best judge of your own motives," said Fatello, stiffly, "but you quite misconstrue mine. It never entered my head to view you as a victim, or to think myself called upon to atone, by providing you with a rich and handsome wife, for the jealousy you so successfully proved groundless. Such compensation would be excessive for so slight an injury. No, no, baron--you have quite mistaken me. As the nearest connexion and natural guardian of Mademoiselle Gonfalon, it is my duty to watch over her, and not to allow her feelings to be trifled with. For some time past, I have suspected her affections were engaged, but it never occurred to me they were fixed upon you. Well--last night I go to a ball, and, actuated by suspicions to which it is unnecessary to recur, I listen to your conversation with my sister-in-law. To a plain man like myself, it bore but one interpretation--that you have sought and won her heart. You deny this, and assert your language to have been that of common gallantry and compliment, such as may be addressed to any woman without her inferring serious intentions. Here, then, we are gravely at issue. You maintain my ears deceived me; I persist in crediting their evidence. Fortunately, an arbiter is easily found. I shall now return home, see my sister-in-law, and confess to her my eaves-dropping, keeping its real motive and my visit to you profoundly secret. From her I shall learn how matters really stand. If her account agree with Baron Steinfeld's, I shall evermore mistrust my hearing; if the contrary, and that the baron, himself a sworn foe to marriage, has compromised the happiness of a young and confiding woman, why, then, he will not be surprised if I seek of him, for so grave an offence, the reparation which a short time ago I was ready to afford him for one comparatively insignificant." And Fatello bowed formally, and with severe countenance moved towards the door. But before he could leave the room, Steinfeld, who had stood for a moment thoughtful and perplexed, hurried to intercept him, and laid his hand upon the lock.

"You are really too hasty, Fatello," said he, "and not altogether reasonable. What ill weed have you trodden upon, that makes you so captious this morning? Own that our conversation has taken an odd turn! Would any one believe that you, Fatello the _millionnaire_, press a marriage between your sister, the wealthy Mademoiselle Gonfalon, and myself, the needy Baron Steinfeld--and that it is I, the ruined spendthrift, from whom the obstacles to the match proceed? Neither in romance nor in real life has the case a precedent. And you may be assured the world will not applaud your wisdom, nor Mademoiselle Sebastiana feel grateful for your zeal."

"For the world's applause I care not that," replied Fatello, snapping his fingers. "As to my sister, I have neither will nor power to constrain her. I do but afford her the protection she is entitled to at my hands. I press her upon no man, but neither do I suffer her to be trifled with. Sebastiana Gonfalon does not lack suitors, I can assure you."

"Unquestionably," said Steinfeld, with an absent air; "Mademoiselle Gonfalon is indeed a most charming person, and, were she penniless, would still be a prize to any man. I only wish I enjoyed the place in her good opinion you so erroneously imagine me to occupy."

"Well, well," said Fatello, striving to get at the door, before which the baron had planted himself, "since error there is, it will soon be cleared up. You cannot blame me, baron, for preferring, in so delicate an affair, the testimony of my own ears to that of any one person. But if two unite against me, I shall think myself crazed or bewitched, and shall at least be silenced and confounded, if not entirely convinced."

"Answer me one question," said Steinfeld. "If yesterday, before you overheard a part of my conversation with your sister, I had asked of you her hand, exposing to you at the same time the state of my fortunes, or rather of my misfortunes, would you then have sanctioned my suit and pleaded my cause with Mademoiselle Gonfalon? Would you, and will you now--for, believe me, I need it more than you think--add the weight of your arguments and advocacy to the prepossession you persist in thinking your sister has in my favour, a prepossession of whose existence I hardly dare flatter myself?"

"Why not?" said Fatello, with an air of straightforward cordiality. "Why not? You are not rich, certainly but Sebastiana is rich enough for both. You have high birth, talents, interest with the Emperor, and, once married, with your debts paid, and your wild oats sown, you may take ambition instead of pleasure for a mistress, and aspire to high employment. Why not return to diplomacy, for which you are so admirably qualified, and come back to us as Austrian ambassador? Believe me, baron, there is a fine career before you, if you will but pursue it."

"Perhaps," said Steinfeld, smiling to himself, like a man to whom a bright perspective is suddenly thrown open; "and, as you say, the first step would be a suitable marriage, which, by ridding me of all encumbrance, might enable me to climb lightly and steadily the hill of wealth and honours."

"And a _millionnaire_ brother-in-law to give you an occasional push by the way," added Fatello, with one of his heavy, purse-proud smiles; "pushes you may repay in kind, for diplomatist and financier should ever hunt in couples."

"My dear Fatello," said Steinfeld, "the prospect is too charming to be lightly relinquished. You must think strangely of my first reluctance to avail myself of your friendly disposition in my favour; but I so little suspected it, I was so bewildered by its sudden revelation, so embarrassed by my own difficulties--and then pride, you know--a morbid fear of being thought mercenary; in short, you will make allowance for my strange way of meeting your kind encouragement. I can only say, that since you deem me worthy of her, and if you can obtain her consent, (a more difficult task, I fear, than you imagine,) I shall be the happiest of men as the husband of the adorable Sebastiana."

"That is speaking to the purpose," said Fatello; "and, for my part, I repeat that I shall be happy to call you brother-in-law. I will do my best for you with Sebastiana, to whom I will at once communicate your formal demand in marriage. But, pshaw! you rogue," added he, with a clumsy attempt at archness, "you have made pretty sure of her consent, and need no brotherly advocate."

"Indeed you are mistaken," replied Steinfeld earnestly. "I only wish I were as confident, and with good reason, as you think me."

"Well, well, no matter," said the banker. "You shall shortly hear your fate."

"I shall be on thorns till I learn it," said the baron. "And, my dear Fatello," said he, detaining the banker, who, after shaking hands with him, was about to leave the room, "it is perhaps not necessary to refer--at least not weigh upon--our conversation at last night's masquerade. It might vex Mademoiselle Gonfalon--to learn that she had been overheard--or--she might doubt your having heard, and think I had been confiding to you a presumptuous and unfounded belief of her partiality for myself. Women, you know, are susceptible on these points; it might indispose her towards me, and lessen my chance. In short," he added, with a smile, "if you will be guided by an _ex-roué_, now reformed, but who has some little experience of the female heart, you will confine yourself to the communication of my proposals, without reference to any thing past, and apply all your eloquence to induce Mademoiselle Sebastiana to receive them as favourably as yourself."

Fatello nodded knowingly.

"Ay, ay," said he, "I see I need not despair of my ears. They do not serve me so badly. But never fear, baron--I will know nothing, except that you are desperately in love, and that your life depends on your suit's success. That is the established formula, is it not?"

When the baron--after escorting Fatello, in spite of his resistance, to the door of the pavilion, where the banker's carriage awaited him--re-entered the breakfast-room, the joyous and hopeful expression his countenance had worn during the latter part of his conversation with his visitor was exchanged for one of anxiety and doubt. Instead of returning to the breakfast, of which he had scarcely eaten a mouthful, he drew his arm-chair to the fire, threw himself into it, and fell into a brown study. The attentive valet, who came in full of concern for his master's interrupted meal, was sharply dismissed, with an order to admit no callers. After a short time, however, Steinfeld's cogitations apparently assumed a rosier hue. The wrinkles on his brow relaxed their rigidity, he ceased to gnaw his mustache, and at length a smile dawned upon his features, and grew till it burst into a laugh. Something or other inordinately tickled the baron's fancy; for he lay back in his chair and laughed heartily, but silently, with the eyes rather than the mouth, for nearly a minute. Then getting up, and lounging pensively through the room, he indulged in a soliloquy of muttered and broken sentences, which, like the secret cipher of a band of conspirators, were unintelligible without a key. Their obscurity was increased by a style of metaphor borrowed from the card-table, and which a man of such correct taste as Steinfeld would doubtless have scrupled to employ in conversation with any one but himself.

"What an odd caprice of fate!" he said. "A strange turn in the game, indeed! The card I most feared turns up trumps! It rather deranges my calculations; but perhaps it is as good a card as the other. Decidedly as sure a one. What certainty that yonder pedantic booby is right in his prognostics? And then there was no avoiding it. Provided, only, Fatello is silent about last night. If not, all is spoilt. And if she makes a scene! Your Spanish dames are reputed fiery as Arabs; but I take her for one of the milder sort--rather a pining than a storming beauty. What if I were to miss both, by some infernal _quiproquo_ or other. Query, too, whether Sebastiana accepts; but I think, with Fatello to back me, I need not fear much on that score. I detect his motives. To your rich upstart, money is dirt compared with descent, connexion, title. He would like to be an ambassador's brother-in-law, the near connexion of a family dating from Charlemagne--he, the man of nothing, with plebeian written on his front. Upwards of half a million. Seven hundred thousand, I daresay. I had reckoned on nearly double, and now I may lose both. Well, _à la grâce du diable_. I will go take a gallop."

And in another half hour the aspirant to the hand and fortune of Sebastiana Gonfalon was cantering round the Bois de Boulogne, followed at the prescribed distance by Celestin, who, mounted on a fine English horse, near sixteen hands high, bore no slight resemblance to an ape exalted on an elephant.

CHAP. IV.--THE CAPTAIN'S ROOM.

The hotel of the Northern Eagle, situated in one of the most respectable of the numerous small streets between the Rue St Honoré and the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs, is one of several hundred establishments of the class, scattered over Paris, and which, although bearing the ambitious title of "_hotel_," differ in no essential respect from what in London are styled third or fourth-rate lodging-houses. It is a tall, narrow, melancholy-looking edifice, entered through an archway, which devours a great part of the ground-floor, and is closed at night by a heavy coach-door, and in the daytime by a four-foot palisade, painted a bright green, with a gate in the middle, and a noisy bell that rings whenever the gate is opened. Under the archway, and in the little paved court that terminates it, there is always a strong smell of blacking in the morning, and an equally strong smell of soup in the afternoon; the former arising from the labours of Jean, a strapping, broad-shouldered native of Picardy, who makes beds, cleans boots, and carries water for the entire hotel; the latter emanating from a small, smoky den, not unlike a ship's caboose, where a dingy cookmaid prepares the diurnal _pot-au-feu_ for the mistress of the hotel, her son and husband, and for a couple of pensioners, who, in consideration of the moderate monthly payment of fifty francs each, are admitted to share the frugal ragouts of Madame Duchambre's dinner-table. By an architectural arrangement, common enough in old Paris houses, and which seems designed to secure a comfortable gush of cold air through the crevices of every door in the building, the foot of the staircase is in the court, open to all weathers--a circumstance most painful to Jean, who takes pride in the polish of his stairs, and is to be seen, whenever his other avocations leave him a moment's leisure, busily repairing, with a brush buckled on his foot, and a bit of wax in a cleft stick, the damage done to their lustre by the muddy boots of the lodgers. The hotel contains about five-and-twenty rooms, all let singly, with the exception of the first floor, divided into two "_appartemens_" of two rooms and a cupboard each, for which Madame Duchambre obtains the extravagant rent of ninety and one hundred francs per month. Above the first floor the rooms are of various quality--from the commodious chamber which, by the French system of an alcove for the bed, is converted in the daytime into a very tolerable imitation of a parlour--to the comfortless attic, an oven in summer, an ice-house in winter, dearly paid at five francs a-week by some struggling artisan who works hard enough in the day to sleep anywhere at night.

At the period referred to by this narrative, a room upon the third floor of the hotel of the Northern Eagle was occupied, as might be ascertained by inspection of a lithographed visiting card, stuck upon the door with a wafer, by Godibert Carcassonne, captain in the 1st African Chasseurs, known emphatically amongst the permanent tenants of the hotel as "The Captain." Not that military occupants were a rarity under the wings of the Northern Eagle; captains were common enough there--majors not very scarce--and it was upon record that more than one colonel had occupied the yellow _salon_ upon the first floor. But none of these warriors bore comparison with Captain Carcassonne in the estimation of Madame Duchambre, an elderly lady with a game leg, and a singularly plain countenance, who had seen better days, and had a strong sense of the proprieties of life. In general she professed no great affection for men of the sword, whom she considered too much addicted to strong drink and profane oaths, and who did not always, she said, respect _la pudeur de la maison_. The captain, however, had completely won her heart--not by any particular meekness or abstinence, for he consumed far more cognac than spring water, had a voice like a deep-mouthed mastiff, and swore, when incensed, till the very rafters trembled. Nevertheless he had somehow or other gained her affections; partly, perhaps, by the regularity with which, upon all his visits to Paris during the previous fifteen years, he had lodged in her house and paid his bills; partly, doubtless, by the engaging familiarity with which he helped himself from her snuff-box, and addressed her as Maman Duchambre.

It was eight o'clock at night, and, contrary to his wont, Captain Carcassonne, instead of contesting a pool at billiards in his accustomed café, or occupying a stall at his favourite Palais Royal theatre, was seated in his room, alone, a coffee-cup and a bottle on the table beside him, the amber mouthpiece of a huge meerschaum pipe disappearing under his heavy dark mustache, smoking steadily, and reading the _Sentinelle de l'Armée_. He was a powerful active man, about forty years of age, with a red-brown complexion, martial features, and a cavalier air, in whom Algerine climate and fatigues had mitigated, if it had not wholly checked, that tendency to corpulence early observable in many French cavalry officers, for the most part a sedentary and full-feeding race. Of a most gregarious disposition, no slight cause would have induced the captain to pass in slow solitude those evening hours, which, according to his creed, ought invariably, in Paris, to dance merrily by in the broad light of gas, and in the excitement of a theatre or coffee-house. Neither was it, in his eyes, a trifle that had placed him, as he expressed it, under close arrest for the evening. He was paying a small instalment of a debt of gratitude, which many would have held expunged by lapse of time, but which Carcassonne still remembered and willingly acknowledged. Many years previously--within a twelvemonth after his promotion from a sergeantcy in a crack hussar regiment to a cornetcy in a corps of chasseurs, newly formed for African service, and in which he had since sabred his way to the command of a troop--Godibert Carcassonne, when on leave of absence at Paris, had been led, by thoughtlessness and by evil associates, rather than by innate vice, into a scrape which threatened to blast his prospects in the army, and consequently in life, and of his extrication from which there was no possibility, unless he could immediately procure five thousand francs. The sum was trifling, but to him it seemed immense, for he estimated it by the difficulty of obtaining it. Driven to desperation, thoughts of suicide beset him, when at that critical moment a friend came to the rescue. By the merest chance, he stumbled upon a former school-fellow, a native of the same department as himself, and his accomplice in many a boyish frolic. They had not seen each other for years. When Carcassonne was taken by the conscription, his schoolmate had already departed to seek fortune at Paris, the Eldorado of provincials, and there, whilst the smart but penniless young soldier was slowly working his way to a commission, he had taken root and prospered. He was not yet a wealthy man, but neither was he a needy or niggardly one, for, on hearing the tale of his friend's difficulties, he offered him, after a few moments' internal calculation, the loan of the sum on which his fate depended, and gruffly cut short the impetuous expression of gratitude with which the generous offer was joyfully accepted. The loan was in fact a gift, for when, some time afterwards, Carcassonne remitted to his friend a small instalment of his debt, scraped together by a pinching economy that did him honour, out of his slender pay, the little draft was returned to him, with the words, "You shall pay me when you are colonel." And as all subsequent attempts were met by the same answer, the money was still unpaid. But never did loan bear better interest of gratitude. Carcassonne had never forgotten the obligation, was never weary of seeking opportunities of requiting it. These were hard to find, for his friend was now a rich man, and there was little the dragoon could do for him beyond choosing his horses, and giving his grooms valuable veterinary hints, derived from his long experience of the chevaline race in the stables of the 1st Chasseurs. Once only was he fortunate enough to hear his benefactor slightingly spoken of at a public table in Paris. That was a happy day for Carcassonne, and a sad one for the offender, who was taken home a few hours afterwards with pistol bullet in his shoulder.

The object of this devoted attachment on the part of the rough but honest-hearted soldier, was not insensible to the sincerity and value of such friendship, and returned it after his own fashion,--that is to say, somewhat as the owner of a noble dog permits its demonstrations of affection, and requites them by an occasional caress. When Carcassonne came to Paris, which he did as often as he could get leave of absence from his duties in Africa, his first visit was always for his benefactor, who invariably got up a dinner for him--not at his own house, which the dragoon would have considered a tame proceeding, but at some renowned restaurant--a regular _bamboche_, as the African styled it, where champagne corks flew and punch flamed from six in the evening till any hour after midnight. Then, the civilian's occupations being numerous, and his sphere of life quite different from that of the soldier, the two saw but little of each other, except through a casual meeting in the rich man's stables, or on the boulevard, or when--but this was very rare--Carcassonne was surprised in his room, at the Northern Eagle, by an unexpected but most welcome visit from his friend, come to smoke a passing cigar, and have ten minutes' chat over boyish days and reminiscences.

These visits were a great treat to the captain; and it was the anticipation of one of them that now kept him in his room. To his astonishment, he had received that morning a note from his friend, requesting him to remain at home in the evening, as he would call upon and crave a service of him. Carcassonne was delighted at the intimation, and not feeling quite certain when evening might be said to begin, he shut himself up in his room at four o'clock, ordered in dinner from a neighbouring _traiteur_, sipped his coffee in contented solitude, and now awaited, with the dutiful patience of a soldier on sentry, the promised coming of his friend. At last a cough and a heavy footstep were heard upon the stairs; the captain took up a candle, opened the door, and, stepping out into the gloomy corridor, the light fell upon the tall ungainly figure, and sullen features, of Sigismund Fatello.

"Come in, my dear fellow," cried Carcassonne in his stentorian tones, and with a soldier's oath. "I've expected you these three hours. What--wet? Snow? Come to the fire, and take a sup of cognac till the punch is made."

It snowed heavily outside, and the banker's upper coat had caught a few large flakes in crossing the court. He heeded them not, but putting down, untasted, the glass of brandy handed to him by the captain, he took a chair, and motioned Carcassonne to another.

"What the deuce is the matter with you, Sigismund?" said the captain, looking hard at his friend. "Are you ill?"

"Better than I have for a long time been. Fresh from a wedding."

"Oho!" said Carcassonne. "I thought you had not put on full dress to visit your old comrade in his den at the Northern Eagle. And whose wedding was it?"

"A singular one," replied the banker, parrying the question. "Strangely brought about, certainly. Would you like to hear its history, Carcassonne?"

"By all means," said the captain, who always liked whatever Fatello proposed. "But the business you came about?--you said I could do something for you. What is it?"

"Plenty of time for that. It will keep. Let me tell you of this marriage."

"Delighted to listen," said Carcassonne, settling himself in his chair, and filling his pipe from a huge embroidered bag, once the property of an Arabian Emir's lady, but which a razzia had degraded into a receptacle for tobacco.

"You must know, then, Carcassonne," said Fatello, "that a friend of mine, named Oliver, a man of middle age, more calculated to shine in a counting-house than in a boudoir, was fool enough, not very long ago, to fall in love with a beautiful girl, twenty years younger than himself; and as he was rich, and her father avaricious, the marriage was brought about, although not altogether with her good will."

"Bad," quoth the captain, between two puffs of his pipe. "An unwilling bride is apt to prove a sour wife."

"Once married," continued Fatello, without heeding his friend's interruption, "Oliver, who knew he had not his wife's love, spared no pains to obtain her friendship. He was not such a man, either by person, manners, or temper, as women are apt to fancy; but, to atone for his deficiencies, he covered her with gold, was the slave of her caprices, forestalled her slightest wish. Her amusement and happiness were the whole study of his life; and after a while his efforts seemed crowned with success. She treated him as a friend, and appeared contented with her lot. This was all he had dared to hope, and, having attained this, he was happy. His existence, from boyhood upwards, had been agitated and laborious, but riches had rewarded his toils, and he could now look forward to a long period of happiness and repose. At the very moment he indulged these visions of a bright future, a single word, whispered in his ear by a physician of high repute, crumbled the entire fabric. That word was Consumption, and when he heard it he knew his doom was sealed. His father, his elder brother, his sisters, all had been carried off, in the prime of their strength, by the insidious disease, whose germ, implanted in their system before they saw the light, was ineradicable by the resources of art. The shock was severe--it could not be otherwise--for most of the things were his for which men prize life. But he was no poltroon, to pine at the approach of death; and he nerved himself to meet like a man his inevitable fate. Although with scarce a shadow of hope, he neglected no means of combating the deadly malady; and, enjoining secrecy to his physician, he concealed from every one his belief that his days were numbered and his race wellnigh run. He was calm and resigned, if not hopeful, when he one day received a letter that chilled his very soul. His wife, it told him, loved another, whom she would meet that night at a masquerade. Although anonymous, its indications were so precise, that Oliver, spurred by fiercest jealousy, disguised himself and went secretly to the ball. There he discovered his wife, in the company of a foreign fopling, who, for some time previously, had been a frequent visitor at his house. He kept near them, occasionally catching a sentence confirmatory of his suspicions, until they withdrew from the crowd, and sought a retired nook, where to converse uninterrupted. He found means to secrete himself in their vicinity, and overheard--no evidence of his dishonour, for then he had stabbed them where they stood--but words whence he gathered the existence of the most heartless, perfidious, and cold-blooded calculation.

"The wife of his bosom, to gain whose affection he had squandered millions, and changed his very nature, impatiently awaited his death to bestow her hand, and the fortune he should bequeath her, on the smooth-tongued seducer whose arts had beguiled her. The secret of his fatal malady had been divulged by the physician, to whom alone it was known, in the hearing of this foreign adventurer, who, ever upon the watch to redeem his broken fortunes by a wealthy marriage, profited by the disclosure. He obtained an introduction to Oliver's house, and applied every art and energy to gain his wife's affections. He was but too successful. She listened to his protestations, and on learning her husband's impending death, pledged herself to become his, when she should be released by it from ties she abhorred. All this, and more, Oliver gathered from their conversation, to which he had the courage to listen to the end, although each sentence went to his heart like a stab, leaving in the wound the venom of hate and jealousy, to rankle there until the latest moment of his life. What had you done, Carcassonne, had you been in his place?"

"_Pardieu!_" said the captain, who had listened with profound attention, and great expenditure of smoke, to his friend's narrative; "I can hardly say, Sigismund. If I had kept my hands off the butterfly scoundrel when I heard him courting my wife, I should have followed him when he had had his chat out, and requested the pleasure of crossing swords with him at his earliest convenience; and had I got one good cut at him, he should not have needed another. What did your friend?"

"Very nearly what you have said. He went home and destroyed his will, and made another. Then he sought his enemy, to challenge him to an instant encounter. The mean villain denied his treachery, and swore that her to whom his vows of love were addressed was not Oliver's wife, but his sister-in-law. Oliver well knew this to be a lie, but he affected to believe he had been deceived by similarity of dress and imperfect hearing, for the subterfuge had suddenly suggested to him a sure means of punishing his faithless wife, and defeating her seducer's aim. He declared himself willing to aid the views of the foreigner--one Baron Steinfeld, an Austrian of high family, but ruined fortunes--and to urge his sister-in-law to accept his hand. Disagreeably surprised at such willingness, where he had wished and expected opposition, Steinfeld strove to recede, but found extrication impossible from the trap he had rushed into. Finally he was compelled to yield; the less unwillingly because the bride thus given him was not without fortune, which Oliver exaggerated, the better to allure him. So that, when Oliver left him, it was to convey his formal proposals to the lady, who was nothing loath, and to-day they were married."

"To-day!" exclaimed Carcassonne. "This, then, is the wedding you come from. And what said Madame Oliver?"

"What could she say? Made all the secret opposition she could, no doubt; and then, finding it in vain, for her sister seemed as much fascinated by the Austrian Lothario as she was herself, she took ill and kept her bed. It needed all her woman's pride, and her fear of malicious comment, to carry her calmly through to-day's ceremonies and festivities."

"A very strange tale!" cried the captain. "And all true, eh?"

"To the letter. But that is not all. To-day, after the marriage, Oliver sought five minutes' conversation with his newly-made brother-in-law; and his first act, when they were alone, was to hand him the anonymous letter he had received on the day of the masquerade, in which was mentioned the colour of the ribbons worn by Madame Oliver at the ball, as a sign by which Steinfeld was to distinguish her amongst the crowd of dominos."

"Good!" said Carcassonne emphatically. "And what said the Kaiserlic?"

"Denied every thing, until Oliver recapitulated, word for word, certain phrases of the conversation he had overheard. This struck him dumb; but soon he recovered his effrontery, and expressed surprise at Oliver's reviving the subject, especially at that moment."

"'Since you deemed it advisable to overlook the offence at the time, and to promote my marriage with your sister-in-law,' he said, 'I cannot understand your motive for now raking up the grievance.'

"'I will explain,' replied Oliver. 'I married you to my sister-in-law that you might never be my widow's husband, whether I die a few months hence, by the hand of God, or to-morrow by yours, in the duel which shall no longer be delayed.'"

"The devil!" shouted the captain, at this announcement. "Your friend Oliver is the wrong man to jest with, I see that. But will he really fight his sister's husband?"

"He really will," replied Fatello, calmly. "Should you scruple, in his place?"

"By my soul, it's hard to say, till one is tried. We are used in Africa to hear fellows reckoning on our boots before we think of leaving them off. But that hurts neither us nor the boots, whilst a man's wife----It is aggravating, certainly, particularly to a man of your Oliver's temper. A saint or a priest might not approve, but, as a soldier and sinner, I must say revenge, in such a case, seems sweet and natural."

"Then," said Fatello, "I may reckon on your assistance to-morrow?"

"On my assistance!--I--you! What the devil do you mean?" cried Carcassonne, dropping his pipe, and starting from his seat in extraordinary perturbation.

"Merely that my friend Oliver and your friend Fatello are one and the same person, whose business here to-night is to ask you to second him in his duel to-morrow with Baron Ernest von Steinfeld, married this morning to Mademoiselle Sebastiana Gonfalon."

CHAP. V.--THE DAY AFTER THE WEDDING.

It may easily be imagined that Steinfeld, brave as he unquestionably was, did not feel particularly pleased at finding himself called upon to risk his life in a profitless duel, at the very moment when that life had acquired fresh value in his eyes, through his acquisition of a pretty wife and a handsome fortune. The former, it is true, the baron, whose utter selfishness made him incapable of love in the higher sense of the word, prized only as a child does a new plaything, or an epicure a fresh dish presented to his sated palate. Pretty and attractive as his bride was, her personal charms weighed far less with him than her golden ones. Even in these he had been somewhat disappointed. Although considerable, they were less than Fatello's round-numbered generalities had led him to expect; and, moreover, when the time came to discuss the settlements, the banker fought hard to secure his sister-in-law's fortune upon her own head and that of her children. This, however, Steinfeld vigorously resisted, urging the necessity of extricating his estates from pawn; and Sebastiana, enamoured of her handsome bridegroom, and whose ardent and jealous imagination drew a romantic picture of a tête-à-tête existence in a secluded chateau, far from the rivalries of a capital, expressed so strongly her will to apply her fortune in the manner Steinfeld desired, that Fatello, after much opposition, and with no good grace, was compelled to yield the point. The sum thus placed in the Austrian's power, although less than he had anticipated, was yet so large to a man in his position, that its possession threw a pleasant rose-coloured tint over his existence, of which the prospect of poverty, and the annoyances of duns, had for some time past deprived it. So that when, upon his wedding-day, Fatello fiercely taxed him with his perfidy, repeated the words of insult he had addressed to him on the morrow of the masquerade, and insisted upon a duel, the baron did all in his power to pacify him, urging their new but near connexion as an insuperable obstacle to a quarrel, and even humbling himself to express contrition for his offence, which he persisted, however, would have been viewed as but a venial one by any but so morbid, jealous, and vindictive a person as Fatello, and which, in no case, considering the relation they now stood in to each other, could be held to justify them in seeking each other's life. But to his expostulations, apologies, and arguments, Fatello replied with such savage invective and ungovernable violence, taunting the baron with cowardice, and threatening him, if he refused the reparation demanded, with public exposure and manual chastisement--threats, of whose execution Fatello's intemperate character and colossal frame (the latter still muscular and powerful in spite of the disease mining it) allowed very little doubt--that Steinfeld saw there was no alternative but to accept the meeting; and, assuming the cold and haughty tone of an injured man, he briefly arranged with Fatello its principal conditions. To avoid scandal, and to insure, as far as possible, the safety of the survivor, the duel was to take place in the grounds of a country house belonging to the banker, at about a league from Paris, and the seconds and surgeon were to be pledged to the strictest secrecy. Fatello named Captain Carcassonne, and Steinfeld the Viscount Arthur de Mellay, between whom the details of the affair were to be settled.

Both the principals, however, in this singular duel, were destined to experience difficulties from the friends they had fixed upon to second them. Captain Carcassonne, who himself cared no more for a duel than an English prizefighter does for a round with the gloves, and who never slept a wink the fewer, or ate a mouthful less breakfast before going out to fight one, was seized with a sudden trepidation when he learned that his friend, whom he well knew to be unskilled in fence and fire, was to enter the field with a man reputed expert in both. At first he would not hear of the meeting taking place, swearing, in direct opposition to what he had just before said, that he should not think of fighting for such a trifle. When this plea was overruled, a bright idea struck him. He would pick a quarrel with Steinfeld, and wing him with a pistol-shot, or spoil his beauty with a sabre-cut, just as Fatello chose; ay, would kill him outright, if nothing less would satisfy his vindictive friend. But Fatello, whose morbid desire of revenge had assumed the character of a monomania, rejected all the captain's plans; and Carcassonne, whose affection and deference for his old companion and benefactor were unbounded, ceased to make objections, and fixed his thoughts solely upon the necessary preliminaries. As to Fatello's announcement of the danger his life was in from lurking disease, (a danger more remote, but also more certain than that he would incur upon the morrow,) it would deeply have grieved the worthy captain had he attached the least credit to it; but his contempt for doctors and their prognostications prevented his dwelling on it longer than to give a smile to the credulity of his friend. Meanwhile Steinfeld had some trouble with de Mellay. It not being the fashion in France for newly-married couples to escape from the place of their wedding as fast as four posters can carry them, the baron had taken his bride to his house in the Rue St Lazare, which a little arrangement had adapted for their residence during the few days that were to elapse before their departure for Germany. There, upon the evening of his wedding-day, he had a conference with the viscount, who, startled, like Carcassonne, at the news of the projected duel, insisted on full explanations before consenting to render Steinfeld the service required of him. These explanations Steinfeld was compelled to give; and although he spread over them a varnish favourable to himself, de Mellay plainly saw that the part the Austrian had played in the whole affair did him no credit, and that Fatello's extraordinary vindictiveness, if not justified, was in some degree extenuated, by his adversary's perfidious manœuvres and gross breach of hospitality. He at first insisted on attempting a reconciliation, but Steinfeld having convinced him of its impossibility, he would not refuse to stand by an intimate friend and companion, who had more than once gone upon the ground with him. He suggested, however--almost, indeed, made it a condition--that the baron should fire wide, or not at all the first time, in doing which he ran little risk, for Fatello was known to be unskilled with the pistol. De Mellay resolved to place the duellists as far apart as possible, and to make them fire together. He made sure Fatello would miss the first shot, and that then, if Steinfeld had not fired, the affair could easily be made up.

It was three in the afternoon, and the snow lay thick upon the ground, when Steinfeld and his second entered a small door in the paling of the banker's park, at a short distance from which they had dismissed their hackney coach. Fatello, Carcassonne, and Dr Pilori, had preceded them in the banker's carriage. The five men met upon a bowling-green surrounded by trees, which, although leafless, were so thickly planted as to form an impervious screen. More for form's sake and the satisfaction of conscience, than with hope of success, the seconds essayed a reconciliation. The attempt was rendered fruitless by Fatello's firm determination; and after a brief conference between the viscount and Carcassonne, the combatants were placed at twenty paces. It was agreed they were to fire together, when six had been counted. The seconds stepped aside. Carcassonne counted. When he came to "_six_" a single report followed. Steinfeld staggered. De Mellay ran to him.

"Nothing," said the baron. "My dear brother-in-law shoots better than I thought, that is all." And he showed a rent made by Fatello's bullet in the front of his tightly-buttoned surtout, near the waist. A button had been cut away, and the ball had grazed the skin, but without drawing blood.

"This shall not avail you, sir," cried Fatello, in a tone of indescribable exasperation. "We came to fight, not to play. Fire, sir!" And he stood sideways, expecting his adversary's bullet.

Steinfeld smiled bitterly. Then raising his pistol, he took aim at a red-breast, which, scared from the bough by Fatello's fire, had again settled, tamed by cold and hunger, upon a sapling five-and-twenty paces off. Bark and feathers flew at the same time, and the unlucky little bird lay disembowelled upon the snow. Carcassonne and de Mellay exchanged a word or two, and advanced towards Fatello.

"Enough done, my dear Sigismund," said the captain. "After the baron's forbearance, this can go no farther."

Fatello's reply was a torrent of imprecations. His eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks pale as death: he was insane with passion. The captain in vain endeavoured to soothe and calm him. He raged and stormed like a madman.

"Monsieur Fatello," said de Mellay, with surprise--almost with disgust--"for heaven's sake compose yourself. This persistence is unworthy of you. What injury have you received to justify such malignity? Neither your second nor myself can let this affair proceed, otherwise than to a reconciliation."

There was a decision in the young man's tone and manner that seemed to strike Fatello and check his fury. For a moment or two he gazed silently at the viscount, as if recalled to reason by his remonstrance. It was the trick of the maniac, to put the keeper off his guard. Suddenly pushing Carcassonne aside, he reached, in two bounds, a pistol-case that lay open at a short distance, and, seizing one of the weapons, levelled it at Steinfeld. With a cry of horror, de Mellay and Carcassonne threw themselves before the baron.

"This is murder!" exclaimed the viscount.

"Stop!" said Steinfeld, pale, but quite calm. "Wait a moment, sir, and you shall be satisfied. There is no alternative, my dear de Mellay. Monsieur Fatello insists. Give me the other pistol."

De Mellay hesitated, and looked at the captain.

"_Ma foi!_" said Carcassonne, shrugging his shoulders, as if he thought a bullet more or less hardly worth so much discussion--"if they _will_ have it!" The principals resumed their ground, and the word was again given. This time both pistols were discharged. Steinfeld stirred not, but Fatello fell to the ground and lay there without motion. Dr Pilori ran forward, and, kneeling beside him, unbuttoned his coat. There was a small blue spot on the breast, from which oozed a drop or two of blood. The doctor seized the wrist of the fallen man. Steinfeld and the seconds gazed anxiously in his face, awaiting his verdict.

"I aimed at his arm," said Steinfeld gloomily, "but the cold made my hand shake."

Carcassonne seemed not to hear the remark. De Mellay glanced at the baron, and then at the bird that lay upon the blood-sprinkled snow more than twenty yards off.

"Quite dead," said Pilori, letting the arm fall. "It is a painful thing to kill a man," added the materialist doctor to Steinfeld, who stood regarding his victim with a moody and regretful gaze. "It may be satisfactory to you to know that he could not have lived six months longer."

In France, a few years ago, duels, even when fatal in result, did not necessarily entail strict judicial investigation, unless such investigation was provoked by the friends of the fallen man. In the instance here recorded, no one thought proper to take vindictive steps. Fatello's coachman was instructed, and largely bribed, to say that his master had been struck with apoplexy in his carriage, and that, on discovering his condition, he had at once driven him to Dr Pilori. The physician's arrival at the house, in company with the corpse, and the absence of hemorrhage from the wound, rendered it easy to conceal the latter, and gave plausibility to the story, which found general credit. It was not till several days afterwards that a report spread of the real cause of the banker's death. Even then it attained little publicity, and by many was looked upon as a malicious fabrication. Before it got wind, however, the survivors of the domestic drama we have narrated, were far from its scene. By a will made a month before his death, Fatello had left the whole of his great riches, with the exception of some munificent donations to public charities, and of an ample legacy to Captain Carcassonne, to a cousin of his own name in Alsace. But he could not alienate his wife's fortune, or deprive her of the splendid jointure secured to her by her father's cautious greediness; and these constituted very large wealth, with which his widow, shortly after his death, left Paris for her native country. Her Parisian friends and acquaintances were edified, in the highest degree, by the grief she displayed at Fatello's decease. She was disconsolate; and, for at least a day and a half, "_cette pauvre Madame Fatello_" was the prevailing topic of conversation, and the object of universal sympathy. Hen-pecked husbands held her up as a model of conjugal affection; and wicked wives secretly wondered at the poignant regret shown by such a young, rich, and handsome widow, for so ugly, unprepossessing, and morose a man. But it occurred to no one to seek the cause of her excessive grief in a bridal wreath instead of in a funeral shroud; to trace the source of her sorrow to the loss of an expected husband whom she passionately loved, not to that of a departed one, whom she never regretted.

Although little apprehensive of persecution, many motives concurred to render Paris an undesirable residence for the survivor of the duel in which Fatello met his death. The day after the fatal meeting, a travelling carriage left Paris by the road to Brussels. It contained Ernest von Steinfeld and his bride. In spite of some practice in duelling, and of the triple armour of selfishness in which he was habitually cased, there was a cloud upon the baron's brow which change of scene and the caresses of his young wife did not always suffice to dissipate. And, although sensible to his bride's beauty and fascination, and grateful, as far as it was in his nature to be so, for the passionate affection she showed him, it may be doubted whether he would not have repulsed her endearments, and spurned her from him, had he detected a secret that lay buried in the innermost recesses of her heart--had he recognised, in Sebastiana Gonfalon, the writer of the two anonymous letters that tended so materially to bring about her marriage, and the violent death of Sigismund Fatello.

As it was, the Baroness von Steinfeld had not long to congratulate herself on the success of her culpable manœuvres, whose sole extenuation was to be found in the fiery passions of her race, and in a moral education totally neglected. Doubtless, when planning and carrying out her guilty scheme, the possibility of so terrible a result never occurred to her; and it were attributing improbable depravity to one so young to doubt that she felt remorse at the catastrophe. She did not long await her punishment. Bright as were her hopes of happiness when led to the altar by the man she adored, she soon was bitterly convinced, that no true or permanent felicity could be the consequence of a union achieved by guilty artifice, and sealed with a brother's blood. A few months were sufficient to darken her destiny and blight her joys. Her fortune swallowed up by Steinfeld's debts and extravagance, her person speedily became indifferent to the sated and cold-hearted voluptuary; and whilst her reckless husband, faithful to nothing but to his hatred of matrimonial ties, again galloped upon the road to ruin, in the most dissipated circles of the Austrian capital, she saw herself condemned to solitude and unavailing regrets, in the very castle where she had anticipated an existence of unalloyed bliss.

THE "GREEN HAND."

A "SHORT" YARN.[13]

[13] "_Short_"--nauticè, _unfinished_.

"Come, old ship, give us a yarn!" said the younger forecastle-men to an old one, on board of an Indiaman then swiftly cleaving the waves of the western Atlantic before the trade-wind, and outward-bound, with a hearty crew and a number of passengers. It was the second of the two dog-watches; and, the ship being still in the region of evening twilights, her men, in a good humour, and with leisure, were then usually disposed, as on this occasion, to make fast their roaming thoughts by help of a good yarn, when it could be got. There were plenty of individuals, amongst a crew of forty, calculated by their experience, or else by their flow of spirits and fancy, to spin it. Each watch into which they were divided had its especial story-teller, with whose merits it twitted the other, and on opportunity of a general _reunion_, they were pitted against one another like two fighting-cocks, or a couple of rival novelists in more polished literary society at home. The one was a grave, solemn, old North-Sea whaler with one eye, who professed to look down with contempt upon all raw head-work, on navigation compared with seamanship, and fiction against fact. As for himself, he rested all his fame upon actual experience, and told long dry narratives of old shipmates, of his voyages and adventures, and sometimes of the most incredible incidents, with a genuine briny gusto which pleased the veteran stagers beyond expression. They were full of points of seamanship-- expedients for nice emergencies, tacks, knots, and splices; he gave the very conversation of his characters, with all the "says he" and "says I;" and one long recital of the old fellow's turned upon the question between himself and a newfangled second-mate about the right way to set up back-stays, in which he, the sailor, was proved correct by the loss of the ship. The other story-teller, again, was a Wapping man; a lively, impudent young Cockney, who had the most miraculous faculty of telling lies--not only palpable lies, but lies absolutely impossible: yet they were so sublimely told often, and he contrived to lug into them such a quantity of gorgeous tinsel ornament, as, in his happier efforts, decidedly to carry the day against his opponent. The London hand had seen _life_ too, of which, with respect to what is called the world, his competitor was as ignorant as a child. He had his sentimental vein, accordingly, in which he took the last love-tale out of some "Penny Story-Teller" or fashionable novel he had spelled over below, and turned it over into a parody that would have thrown its unfortunate author into convulsions of horror, and his critics into shrieks of laughter. The fine language of lords and ladies, of romantic heroines, or of foreign counts and bandits, was gravely retailed and gravely listened to by a throng of admiring jack-tars; while the old whaler smoked his pipe sulkily apart, gave now and then a scornful glance out of his weather-eye, and called it "all _high-dic_' and soger's gammon."

On this occasion, however, the group forward did not solicit the services of either candidate, as they happened to have present among them a shipmate who, by general confession, "took the shine" out of both, although it was rarely they could get hold of him. "Old Jack," the captain's private steward, was the oldest seaman on board, and having known the captain when the latter went to sea, had sailed with him almost ever since he commanded a ship, as well as lived in his house on shore. He did not now keep his watch, nor take his "trick at the helm," except when he chose, and was altogether a privileged sort of person, or one of "the idlers." His name was Jacobs, which afforded a pretext for calling him "Old Jack," with the sailor's fondness for that Christian cognomen, which it is difficult to account for, unless because Jonah and St John were seafaring characters, and the Roman Catholic holy clerk St Nicholas was baptised "Davy Jones," with sundry other reasons good at sea. But Old Jack was, at any rate, the best hand for a yarn in the Gloucester Indiaman, and had been once or twice called upon to spin one to the ladies and gentlemen in the cuddy. It was partly because of his inexhaustible fund of good-humour, and partly from that love of the sea which looked out through all that the old tar had seen and undergone, and which made him still follow the bowsprit, although able to live comfortably ashore. In his blue jacket, white canvass trousers edged with blue, and glazed hat, coming forward to the galley to light his pipe, after serving the captain's tea of an evening, Old Jack looked out over the bulwarks, sniffed the sharp sea-air, and stood with his shirt-sleeve fluttering as he put his finger in his pipe, the very embodiment of the scene--the model of a prime old salt who had ceased to "rough it," but could do so yet if needful.

"Come, old ship!" said the men near the windlass as soon as Old Jack came forward, "give us a yarn, will ye?" "Yarn!" said Jack, smiling--"what yarn, mates? 'Tis a fine night, though, for that same--the clouds flies high, and she's balling off a good ten knots sin' eight bells." "That she is, bo'--so give us a yarn now, like a reg'lar old A. 1. as you are!" said one. "'Vast there, mate," said a man-o'-war's-man, winking to the rest,--"you're always a-cargo-puddling, Bill! D'ye think Old Jack answers to any other hail nor the Queen's? I say, old three-decker in or'nary, we all wants one o' your close-laid yarns this good night. Whaling Jim here rubs his down with a thought overmuch o' the tar, an' young Joe dips 'em in yallow varnish,--so if you says Nay, why, we'll all save our grog, and get drunk as soon as may-be." "Well, well, mates," said Jack, endeavouring to conceal his flattered feelings, "what's it to be, though?" "Let's see," said the man-o'-war's-man--"ay, give us the Green Hand!" "Ay, ay, the Green Hand!" exclaimed one and all. This "Green Hand" was a story Old Jack had already related several times, but always with such amusing variations, that it seemed on each repetition a new one--the listeners testifying their satisfaction by growls of rough laughter, and by the emphatic way in which, during a pause, they squirted their tobacco-juice on the deck. What gave additional zest to this particular yarn, too, was the fact of its hero being no less than the captain himself, who was at this moment on the poop quarter-deck of the ship, pointing out something to a group of ladies by the round-house--a tall handsome-looking man of about forty, with all the mingled gravity and frank good-humour of a sailor in his firm weather-tinted countenance. To have the power of secretly contrasting his present position and manners with those delineated by Old Jack's episode from the "skipper's" previous biography, was the _acme_ of comic delight to these rude sons of Neptune, and the narrator just hit this point.

"Ye see," began he, "'tis about six-an'-twenty year gone since I was an able seaman before the mast, in a small Indyman they called the Chester Castle, lying at that time behind the Isle of Dogs in sight of Grenidge Hospital. She was full laden, but there was a strong breeze blowing up that wouldn't let us get underweigh; and, besides, we waited for the most part of our hands. I had sailed with the same ship two voyages before; so, says the captain to me one day, "Jacobs, there's a lady over at Greenwich yonder wants to send her boy to sea in the ship--for a sickening I s'pose. I'm a going up to town myself," says he, "so take the quarter-boat, and two of the boys, and go ashore with this letter, and see the young fool. From what I've heard," says the skipper, "he's a jackanapes as will give us more trouble than thanks. However, if you find the lady's bent on it, why, she may send him aboard to-morrow if she likes. Only we don't carry no young gentlemen, and if he slings his hammock here, you must lick him into shape. I'll make a sailor of him, or a cabin-boy." "Ay, ay, sir," says I, shoving the letter into my hat; so in half an hour's time I knocks at the door of the lady's house, rigged out in my best, and hands over the screed to a fat fellow with red breeches and yallow swabs on his shoulders, like a captain of marines, that looked frightened at my hail, for I thou't he'd been deaf by the long spell he took before he opened the door. In five minutes I heard a woman's v'ice ask at the footman if there was a sailor awaiting below. "Yes, marm," says he; and "show him up," says she. Well, I gives a scrape with my larboard foot, and a tug to my hair, when I gets to the door of _such_ a fine room above decks, all full o' tables, an' chairs, an' sofers, an' piangers, an' them sort o' highflying consarns. There was a lady all in silks and satins on one of the sofers, dressed out like a widow, with a pretty little girl as was playing music out of a large book--and a picter of a man upon the wall, which I at once logged it down for him she'd parted company from. "Sarvint, ma'am," says I. "Come in, my good man," says the lady. "You're a sailor?" says she--asking, like, to be sure if I warn't the cook's mate in dish-guise, I fancy. "Well, marm," I raps out, "I make bould to say as I hopes I am!"--an' I catches a sight o' myself in a big looking-glass behind the lady, as large as our sky-sail,--and, being a young fellow in them days, thinks I, "Blow me, if Betsy Brown asked me that now, I'd ask her if _she_ was a _woman_!" "Well," says she, "Captain Steel tells me, in this here letter, he's agoing to take my son. Now," says she, "I'm sore against it--couldn't you say some'at to turn his mind?" "The best way for that, yer ladyship," says I, "is to let him go, if was only the length of the Nore. The sea'll turn his stomach for him, marm," I says, "an' then we can send him home by a pilot." "He wanted for to go into the navy," says the lady again, "but I couldn't think on that for a moment, on account of this fearful war; an', after all, he'll be safer in sailing at sea nor in the army or navy--don't you think so, my good man?" "It's all you knows about it," thinks I; hows'ever, I said there wasn't a doubt on it. "Is Captain Steel a rash man?" says she. "How so, marm?" says I, some'at taken aback. "I hope he does not sail at night, or in storms, like too many of his profession, I'm afeard," says she; "I hope he always weighs the anchor in such cases, very careful." "Oh, in course," says I, not knowin', for the life of me, what she meant. I didn't like to come the rig over the poor lady, seein' her so anxious like; but it was no use, we was on such different tacks, ye see. "Oh yes, marm," I says, "Captain Steel al'ays reefs taups'ls at sight of a squall brewing to wind'rd; and we're as safe as a church, then, ye know, with a man at the wheel as knows his duty." "This relieves my mind," the lady says, "very much;" but I couldn't think why she kept sniffing all the time at her smelling bottle, as she wor agoin' to faint. "Don't take it to heart so, yer ladyship," I says at last; "I'll look after the young gentleman till he finds his sea-legs." "Thank you," says she; "but, I beg your pardon, would ye be kind enough for to open the winder, and look out if you see Edward? I think he's in the garding.--I feel sich a smell of pitch and tar!" I hears her say to the girl; and says she to me again, "Do you see Edward there?--call to him, please." Accordingly, I couldn't miss sight of three or four young slips alongside, for they made plenty of noise--one of 'em on top of a water-barrel smoking a segar; another singing out inside of it for mercy; and the rest roaring round about it, like so many Bedlamites. "No wonder the young scamp wants to sea," thinks I, "he's got nothin' arthly to do but mischief." "Which is the young gentleman, marm?" says I, lookin' back into the room--"Is it him with the segar and the red skull-cap?" "Yes," says the lady--"call him up, please." "Hallo!" I sings out, and all runs off but him on the barrel, and "Hallo!" says he. "You're wanted on deck, sir," I says; and in five minutes in comes my young gemman, as grave as you please. "Edward," says the mother, "this is one of Captain Steel's men." "Is he going to take me?" says the young fellow, with his hands in his pockets. "Well, sir," I says, "'tis a very bad look-out, is the sea, for them as don't like it. You'll be sorry ten times over you've left sich a berth as this here, afore you're down Channel." The young chap looks me all over from clue to earing, and says he, "My mother told you to say that!" "No, sir," says I, "I says it on my own hook." "Why did you go yourself, then?" says he. "I couldn't help it," answers I. "Oh," says the impertinent little devil, "but you're only one of the common sailors, ain't you?" "Split me, you little beggar!" thinks I, "if I doesn't show you the odds betwixt a common sailor, as ye call it, and a lubber of a boy, before long!" But I wasn't goin' to let him take the jaw out o' me, so I only laughed, an' says I, "Why, I'm captain of the foretop at sea, any how." "Where's your huniform, then?" says the boy, lowering his tone a bit. "Oh," I says, "we doesn't al'ays wear huniform, ye know, sir. This here's what we call ondress." "I'm sorry, sir," says the lady, "I didn't ax you to sit down." "No offence at all, marm," I says, but I took a couple o' glasses of brandy as was brought in. I saw 'twas no use goin' against the young chap; so, when he asked what he'd have to do aboard, I told him nothing to speak of, except count the sails now and then, look over the bows to see how the ship went, and go aloft with a spy-glass. "Oh," says his mother at this, "I hope Captain Steel won't never allow Edward to go up those dangerous ladders! It is my pertic'lar request he should be punished if he does." "Sartainly, marm, I'll mention it to the captain," I says, "an' no doubt he'll give them orders as you speak on." "The captain desired me to say the young gentleman could come aboard as soon as he likes," says I, before goin' out of the door. "Very well, sir," says the lady, "I shall see the tailor this same arternoon, and get his clothes, if so be it must." The last word I said was, putting my head half in again to tell 'em, "There was no use gettin' any huniforms at present, seein' the ship's sailmaker could do all as was wanted arterwards, when we got to sea."

Well, two or three days after, the captain sent word to say the ship would drop down with the morning tide, and Master Collins had better be aboard by six o'clock. I went ashore with the boat, but the young gemman's clothes warn't ready yet; so it was made up he was to come on board from Gravesend the day after. But his mother and an old lady, a friend of theirs, would have it they'd go and see his bed-room, and take a look at the ship. There was a bit of a breeze with the tide, and the old Indiaman bobbed up and down on it in the cold morning; you could hear the wash of water poppling on to her rudder, with her running gear blown out in a bend; and Missus Collins thought they'd never get up the dirty black sides of the vessel, as she called 'em. The other said her husband had been a captain, an' she laid claim to a snatch of knowledge. "Sailor," says she to me, as we got under the quarter, "that there tall mast is the main-bowsprit, ain't it? and that other is the gallant bowling you call it, don't you?" says she. "No doubt, marm," says I, winking to the boys not to laugh. "It's all right," I says. Howsoever, as to the bed-room, the captain showed 'em over the cabin, and put 'em off by saying the ship was so out of order he couldn't say which rooms was to be which yet, though they needn't fear Master Ned would get all comfortable; so ashore the poor woman went, pretty well pleased, considerin' her heart was against the whole consarn.

Well, the next afternoon, lying off Gravesend, out comes a wherry with young master. One of the men said there was a midshipman in it. "Midshipman, be blowed!" says I; "did ye ever see a reefer in a wherry, or sitting out o' the starn-sheets? It's neither more nor less nor the greenhorn we've got." "Why don't the bo'sun pipe to man side-ropes for him!" says th' other; "but, my eye, Bob," says he to me, "what a sight of traps the chap's got in the boat!--'twill be enough to heel the Chester Castle to the side he berths upon, on an even keel. Do he mean to have the captain's cabin, I wonder!" Up the side he scrambles, with the help of a side-ladder, all togged out to the nines in a span-new blue jacket and anchor buttons, a cap with a gould band, and white ducks made to fit--as jemmy-jessamy a looking fellow as you'd see of a cruise along London parks, with the watermen singing out alongside to send down a tackle for the dunnage, which it took a pair of purchase-blocks to hoist them out on board. "What's all this?" says the mate, coming for'ard from the quarter-deck. "'Tis the young gemman's traps, sir," I says. "What the devil!" says the mate, "d'ye think we've room to stow all this lumber? Strike it down into the forehold, Jacobs--but get out a blue shirt or two, and a Scotch cap, for the young whelp first, if he wants to save that smooth toggery of his for his mammy. You're as green as cabbage, I'm feared, my lad!" says he. By this time the boy was struck all of a heap, an' didn't know what to say when he saw the boat pulling for shore, except he wanted to have a sight of his bed-room. "Jacobs," says the mate, laughing like an old bear, "take him below, and show him his bed-room, as he calls it!" So down we went to the half-deck, where the carpenter, bo'sun, and three or four of the 'prentices, had their hammocks slung. There I left him to overhaul his big donkey of a chest, which his mother had stowed it with clothes enough for a lord ambassador, but not a blessed thing fit to use--I wouldn't 'a given my bit of a black box for the whole on it, ten times over. There was another choke-full of gingerbread, pots o' presarves, pickles, and bottles; and, thinks I, "The old lady didn't know what _shares_ is at sea, I reckon. 'Twill all be gone for footing, my boy, before you've seen blue water, or I'm a Dutchman."

In a short time we was up anchor, going down with a fast breeze for the Nore; and we stood out to sea that night, havin' to join a convoy off Spithead. My gentleman was turned in all standing, on top o' some sails below; and next day he was as sick as a greenhorn could be, cleaning out his land-ballast where he lay, nor I didn't see him till he'd got better. 'Twas blowing a strong breeze, with light canvass all in aloft, and a single reef in the tops'ls; but fine enough for the Channel, except the rain--when what does I see but the "Green Hand" on the weather quarter-deck, holding on by the belaying-pins, with a yumberella over his head. The men for'ard was all in a roar, but none of the officers was on deck save the third mate. The mate goes up to him, and looks in his face. "Why," says he, "you confounded long-shore, picked-up son of a green-grocer, what _are_ you after?" an' he takes the article a slap with his larboard-flipper, as sent it flying to leeward like a puff of smoke. "Keep off the quarter-deck, you lubber," says he, giving him a wheel down into the lea-scuppers,--"it's well the captain didn't catch ye!" "Come aft here, some of ye," sings out third mate again, "to brace up the mainyard; and you, ye lazy beggar, clap on this moment and pull!" At this the greenhorn takes out a pair o' gloves, shoves his fingers into 'em, and tails on to the rope; behind. "Well, dammit!" says the mate, "if I ever see the likes o' that! Jacobs, get a tar-bucket and dip his fists in it; larn him what his hands was made for! I never could bear to see a fellow ashore with his flippers shoed like his feet; but at sea, confound me, it would make a man green-sick over again!" If you'd only seen how Master Collins looked when I shoved his missy fingers into the tar, and chucked the gloves o'board! The next moment he ups fist and made a slap at me, when in goes the brush in his mouth; the mate gives him a kick astarn; and the young chap went sprawling down' into the half-deck ladder, where the carpenter had his shavin'-glass rigged to crop his chin--and there he gets another clip across the jaws from Chips. "Now," says the mate, "the chap'll be liker a sailor to-morrow. He's got some spunk in him, though, by the way he let drive at you, my lad," says he: "that fellow'll either catch the cat or spoil the monkey. Look after him, Jacobs, my lad," says the third mate; "he's in my watch, and the captain wants him to rough it out; so show him the ropes, and let him taste an end now an' then. Ha! ha! ha!" says he again, laughing, "'tis the first time I ever see a embreller loosed out at sea, and but the second I've seen brought aboard even! He's the greenest hand, sure enough, it's been my luck to come across! But green they say's nigh to blue, so look out if I don't try to make a sailor of the young spark!"

Well, for the next three or four days the poor fellow was knocked about on all hands: he'd got to go aloft to the 'gallant cross-trees, and out on the yard foot-ropes the next morning, before breakfast; and, coming down, the men made him fast till he sent down the key of his bottle-chest to pay his footing. If he closed his eyes moment in the watch, slash comes bucketful o' Channel water over him; the third mate would keep him two hours on end, larnin' to rig out a sternsail boom, or grease a royal mast. He led a dog's life of it, too, in the half-deck: last come, in course, has al'ays to go and fill the bread barge, scrub the planks, an' do all the dirty jobs. Them _owners' prentices_, sich as he had for messmates, is always worse to their own kind by far nor the "_common sailors_," as the long-shore folks calls a foremast-man. I couldn't help takin' pity on the poor lad, bein' the only one as had seen the way of his upbringing, and I feelt a sort of a charge of him like; so one night I had a quiet spell with him in the watch, an' as soon's I fell to speak kind-ways, there I seed the water stand i' the boy's eyes. "It's a good thing," says he, tryin' to gulp it down--"it's a good thing mother don't see all this!" "Ho, ho!" says I, "my lad, 'tis all but another way of bein' sea-sick! You doesn't get the land cleared out, and snuff the blue breeze nat'ral like, all at once! Hows'ever, my lad," says I, "take my advice--bring your hammock an' chest into the fok'sle; swap half your fine clothes for blue shirts and canvass trowsers; turn-to ready and willing, an' do all that's asked you--you'll soon find the differ 'twixt the men and a few petty officers an' 'prentices half out their time. The men'll soon make a sailor of you: you'll see what a seaman is; you'll larn ten times the knowledge; an', add to that, you'll not be browbeat and looked jealous on!"

Well, next night, what does he do but follows what I said, and afore long most of his troubles was over; nor there wasn't a willin'er nor a readier hand aboard, and every man was glad to put Ned through any thing he'd got to do. The mates began to take note on him; and though the 'prentices never left off callin' him the Green Hand, before we rounded the Cape he could take his wheel with the best of them, and clear away a sternsail out of the top in handsome style. We were out ten months, and Ned Collins stuck to the fork'sle throughout. When we got up the Thames, he went ashore to see his mother in a check shirt, and canvass trowsers made out of an old royal, with a tarpaulin hat I built for him myself. He would have me to come the next day over to the house for a supper; so, havin' took a kindness to the young chap, why, I couldn't say nay. There I finds him in the midst of a lot o' soft-faced slips and young ladies, a spinning the wonderfullest yarns about the sea and the East Indgees, makin' 'em swallow all sorts of horse-marines' nonsense, about marmaids, sea-sarpents, and sichlike. "Hallo, my hearty!" says he, as soon as he saw me, "heave a-head here, and bring to an anchor in this here blessed chair. Young ladies," says he, "this is Bob Jacobs, as I told you kissed a marmaid his-self. He's a wonderful hand, is Bob, for the fair!" You may fancy how flabbergasted I was at this, though the young scamp was as cool as you please, and wouldn't ha' needed much to make him kiss 'em all round; but I was al'ays milk-an'-water alongside of women, if they topped at all above my rating. "Well," thinks I, "my lad, I wouldn't ha' said five minutes agone there was any thing of the green about ye yet, but I see 'twill take another voy'ge to wash it all out." For to my thinkin', mates, 'tis more of a land-lubber to come the rig over a few poor creatures that never saw blue water, than not to know the ropes you warn't told. "O Mister Jacobs!" says Missus Collins to me that night, before I went off, "d'ye think Edward is tired of that 'ere horridsome sea yet?" "Well, marm," I says, "I'm afeared not. But I'll tell ye, marm," says I, "if you want's to make him cut the consarn, the only thing ye can do is to get him bound apprentice to it. From what I've seen of him, he's a lad that wont bear aught again his liberty; an' I do believe, if he thought he couldn't get free, he'd run the next day!" Well, after that, ye see, I didn't know what more turned up of it; for I went myself round to Hull, and ships in a timber-craft for the Baltic, just to see some'at new.

One day, the third voy'ge from that time, on getting the length of Blackwall, we heard of a strong press from the men-o'-war; and as I'd got a dreadful mislike to the sarvice, there was a lot of us marchant-men kept stowed away close in holes an' corners till we could suit ourselves. At last we got well tired, and a shipmate o' mine and I wanted to go and see our sweethearts over in the town. So we hired the slops from a Jew, and makes ourselves out to be a couple o' watermen, with badges to suit, a carrying of a large parcel and a ticket on it. In the arternoon we came back again within sight of the Tower, where we saw the coast was clear, and made a fair wind along Rosemary Lane and Cable Street. Just then we saw a tall young fellow, in a brown coat, an' a broad-brim hat, standing in the door of a shop, with a paper under his arm, on the look-out for some one. "Twig the Quaker, Bob!" my shipmate says to me. As soon as he saw us, out the Quaker steps, and says he to Bill, in a sleepy sort of a v'ice, "Friend, thou'rt a waterman, I b'lieve?" "D---- it, yes," says Bill, pretty short like, "that's what we hails for! D'ye want a boat, master?" "Swear not, friend," says the broad-brim; "but what I want is this, you see. We have a large vessel, belonging to our house, to send to Havannah, and willin' to give double wages, but we can't find any mariners at this present for to navigate. Now," says he, "I s'pose this onfortunate state o' things is on account of the sinful war as is agoin' on--they're afraid of the risk. Hows'ever, my friends," says he, "perhaps, as you knows the river, ye could put us upon a way of engagin' twenty or more bold mariners, as is not afeared of ventering for good pay?" and with this he looks into his papers; and says Bill, "Well, sir, I don't know any myself--do you Bob?" and he gives me a shove, and says under the rose, "No fear, mate," says Bill, "he's all over green--don't slip the chance for all hands of us at Jobson's." "Why, master," I says, "what 'ud ye give them mariners you speaks on, now?" "Six pound a-month, friend," says he, looking up; "but we gives tea in place of spirits, and we must have steady men. We can't wait, neither," says he, "more nor three days, or the vessel won't sail at all." "My eye!" says Bill, "'t won't do to lose, Bob!--stick to him, that's all." "Well, sir," I says, "I thinks I does have a notion of some'at of the sort. If you sends your papers to Jobson's Tavern to-night, in the second lane 'twixt Barnaby Street and the Blue Anchor Road, over the water, why, I'll get ye as many hands to sign as you wants!" "Thanks, friend," says the young broad-brim, "I will attend to thine advice,"--so he bids us good-day, and stepped into his door again. "Bill," says I, as we went off, "now I think on it, I can't help a notion I've seen that chap's face afore!" "Very like," says Bill, "for the matter o' that 'tis the same with me--them broad-brims is so much of a piece! But that 'ere fellow don't know nothin' of ships, sure enough, or he wouldn't offer what he did, and the crimps' houses all of a swarm with hands!"

"Take my word, mate," says I, "it's a paying trip, or he wouldn't do it--leave a Quaker alone for that! Why, the chap's a parfit youngster, but I am blessed if he don't look as starched as if he'd sat over a dask for twenty year!"

Well, strike me lucky, mates all, if the whole affair warn't a complete trap! Down comes a clerk with the papers, sure enough--but in ten minutes more the whole blessed lot of us was puckalowed, and hard an' fast, by a strong press-gang. They put us into a cutter off Redriff Stairs, an' the next noon all hands was aboard of the Pandora frigate at Sheerness. The first time of being mustered on deck, says Bill to me, "Cuss my eyes, Bob, if there isn't the 'farnal Quaker!" I looked, and sees a midshipman in uniform like the rest, and so it was. "The sly soft-sauderin' beggar!" says I. "All fair in war, and a press-mate!" says one o' the frigate's men. All the while I kept looking and looking at the midshipman; and at last I says to Bill when we got below, giving a slap to my thigh, "Blessed if it ain't! it's the _Green Hand_ himself!" "Green Hand!" says Bill, sulky enough, "who's the Green Hand? Blow me, Bob, if I don't think we're the green hands ourselves, if that's what you're upon!" So I told him the story about Ned Collins. "Well," says he, "if a fellow was green as China rice, cuss me if the reefers' mess wouldn't take it all out on him in a dozen watches. The softest thing I know, as you say, Bob, just now, it's to come the smart hand when you're a lubber; but to sham green after that style, ye know, why 'tis a mark or two above either you or I, messmate. So for my part, I forgives the young scamp, cause I ought to ha' known better!"

By the time the frigate got to sea the story was blown over the whole main-deck; many a good laugh it gave the different messes; and Bill, the midshipman, and I, got the name of the "Three Green Hands."

One middle-watch, Mister Ned comes for'ard by the booms to me, and says he, "Well, Bob Jacobs, you don't bear a grudge, I hope?" "Why," says I, "Mister Collins, 'twould be mutiny now, I fancy, you bein' my officer!" so I gave a laugh; but I couldn't help feelin' hurt a little, 'twas so like a son turnin' against his father, as 'twere. "Why, Bob," says he, "did ye think me so green as not to know a seaman when I saw him? I was afeared you'd known me that time." "Not I, sir," I answers: "why, if we hadn't sailed so long in company, I wouldn't known ye now!" So Master Ned gave me to understand it was all for old times he wanted to ship me in the same craft; but he knew my misliking to the sarvice, though he said he'd rather ha' lost the whole haul of 'em nor myself. So many a yarn we had together of a dark night, and for a couple of years we saw no small sarvice in the Pandora. But if ye'd seen Ned the smartest reefer aboard, and the best liked by the men, in the fore-taups'l bunt in a gale, or over the main-deck hatch, with an enemy's frigate to leeward, or on a spree ashore at Lisbon or Naples, you wouldn't ha' said there was any thing green in his eye, I warrant ye! He was made acting lieutenant of a prize he cut out near Chairboorg, before he passed examination; so he got me for prize bo'sun, and took her into Plymouth. Soon after that the war was ended, and all hands of the Pandora paid off. Master Ned got passed with flying colours, and confirmed lieutenant besides, but he had to wait for a ship. He made me say where I'd be found, and we parted company for about a year.

Well, I was come home from a short trip, and one day Leftenant Collins hunts me up at Wapping Docks, where I'd had myself spliced, six year before, to Betsy Brown, an' was laid up for a spell, havin' seen a good deal of the sea. Ye must know the young leftenant was fell deep in love with a rich Indy Naboob's daughter, which had come over to take her back to the East Ingees. The old fellow was hard close-hauled again the match, notwithstanding of the young folks makin' it all up; so, he'd taken out berths aboard of a large Company's ship, and bought over the captain on no account to let any king's navy man within the gang-ways, nor not a shoulder with a swab upon it, red or blue, beyond the ship's company. But, above all, the old tyrant wouldn't have a blue-jacket, from stem to starn, if so be he'd got nothing ado but talk sweet; I s'pose he fancied his girl was mad after the whole blessed cloth. The leftenant turns over this here log to me, and, says he, "I'll follow her to the world's end, if need be, Bob, and cheat the old villain!" "Quite right too, sir," says I. "Bob," says he, "I'll tell ye what I wants you to do. Go you and enter for the Seringpatam at Blackwall, if you're for sea just now; I'm goin' for to s'cure my passage myself, an' no doubt doorin' the voy'ge something'll turn up to set all square; at any rate, I'll stand by for a rope to pull!" "Why here's a go!" thinks I to myself; "is Ned Collins got so green again, spite of all that's come an' gone, for to think the waves is a-goin' to work wonders, or ould Neptune under the line's to play the parson and splice all!" "Well, sir," I says, "but don't you think the skipper will smoke your weather-roll, sir, at sea, as you did Bill Pikes an' me, you know, sir?" says I. "Oh, Bob, my lad," says the leftenant, "leave you that to me. The fellow most onlikest to a sailor on the Indyman's poop will be me, and that's the way you'll know me!"

Well, I did ship with the Seringpatam for Bombay: plenty of passengers she had; but only clerks, naboobs, old half-pay fellows, and ladies, not to speak o' children and nurses, black and white. She sailed without my sein' Leftenant Collins, so I thought I was to hear no more on it. When the passengers began to muster on the poop, by the time we got out o' Channel, I takes a look over the ladies, in coilin' up the ropes aft, or at the wheel; I knowed the said girl at once by her good looks, and the old fellow by his grumpy, yallow frontispiece. All on a sudden I takes note of a figger coming up from the cuddy, which I made out at once for my Master Ned, spite of his wig and a pair o' high-heeled boots, as gave him the walk of a chap treading amongst eggs. When I hears him lisp out to the skipper at the round-house if there was any fear of wind, 'twas all I could do to keep the juice in my cheek. Away he goes up to windward, holding on by every thing, to look over the bulwarks behind his sweetheart, givin' me a glance over his shoulder. At night I see the two hold a sort of a collogue abaft the wheel, when I was on my trick at the helm. After a while there was a row got up amongst the passengers, with the old nabob and the skipper, to find out who it was that kept a singing every still night in the first watch, alongside of the ladies' cabin, under the poop. It couldn't be cleared up, hows'ever, who it was. All sorts o' places they said it comed from--mizen-chains, quarter-galleries, lower-deck ports, and davit-boats. But what put the old hunks most in a rage was, the songs was every one on 'em such as "Rule Britannia," "Bay of Biscay," "Britannia's Bulwarks," and "All in the Downs." The captain was all at sea about it, and none of the men would say any thing, for by all accounts 'twas the best pipe at a sea-song as was to be heard. For my part, I knowed pretty well what was afloat. One night a man comed for'ard from the wheel, after steering his dog-watch out, and "Well I'm blessed, mates," says he on the fok'sle, "but that chap aft yonder with the lady--he's about the greenest hand I've chanced to come across! What d'ye think I hears him say to old Yallow-chops an hour agone?" "What was it, mate?" I says. "Says he, "Do ye know, Sar Chawls, is the hoshun reelly green at the line--_green_ ye know, Sar Chawls, _reely_ green?' 'No sir,' says the old naboob, ''tis blue.' 'Whoy, ye don't sa--ay so!' says the young chap, pullin' a long face.'" "Why, Jim," another hand drops in, "that's the very chap as sings them first-rate sea-songs of a night! I seed him myself come out o' the mizen-chains!" "Hallo!" says another at this, "then there's some'at queer i' the wind! I _thought_ he gave rather a weather-look aloft, comin' on deck i' the morning! I'll bet a week's grog that chap's desarted from the king's flag, mates!" Well, ye know, hereupon I couldn't do no less nor shove in my oar, so I takes word from all hands not to blow the gaff,[14] an' then gives 'em the whole yarn to the very day, about the Green Hand--for somehow or another I was al'ays a yarning sort of a customer. As soon as they heard it was a love consarn, not a man but swore to keep a stopper on his jaw; only, at findin' out he was a leftenant in the Royal Navy, all hands was for touching hats when they went past.

[14] Let out the secret.

Hows'ever, things went on till we'd crossed the line a good while; the leftenant was making his way with the girl at every chance. But as for the old fellow, I didn't see he was a fathom the nearer with _him_; though, as the Naboob had never clapped eyes on him to know him like, 'twa'n't much matter before heaving in sight o' port. The captain of the Indyman was a rum old-fashioned codger, all for plain sailing and old ways--I shouldn't say overmuch of a smart seaman. He read the sarvice every Sunday, rigged the church an' all that, if it was anything short of a reef-taups'l breeze. 'Twas queer enough, ye may think, to hear the old boy drawling out, "As 'twas in the beginning,"----then, in the one key, "Haul aft the mainsheet,"----"Is now, and ever shall be,"----"Small pull with the weather-brace,"---- "Amen,"----"Well the mainyard,"----"The Lord be with you,"----"Taups'l yard well! "As for the first orficer, he was a dandy know-nothing young blade, as wanted to show off before the ladies; and the second was afraid to call the nose on his face his own, except in his watch; the third was a good seaman, but ye may fancy the craft stood often a poor chance of being well handled.

'Twas one arternoon watch, off the west coast of Africay, as hot a day as I mind on, we lost the breeze with a swell, and just as it got down smooth, land was made out, low upon the starboard bow, to the south-east. The captain was turned in sick below, and the first orficer on deck. I was at the wheel, and I hears him say to the second how the land breeze would come off at night. A little after, up comes Leftenant Collins, in his black wig and his 'long-shore hat, an' begins to squint over the starn to nor'west'ard. "Jacobs, my lad," whispers he to me, "how do ye like the looks o' things?" "Not overmuch, sir," says I; "small enough sea-room for the sky there!" Up goes he to the first officer, after a bit. "Sir," says he, "do ye notice how we've risen the land within the last hour and a-half?" "No, sir," says the first mate; "what d'ye mean?" "Why, there's a current here, takin' us inside the point," says he. "Sir," says the Company's man, "if I didn't know what's what, d'ye think I'd larn it off a gentleman as is so confounded green? There's nothing of the sort," he says. "Look on the starboard quarter then," says the leftenant, "at the man-o'-war bird afloat yonder with its wings spread. Take three minutes' look!" says he. Well, the mate did take a minute or two's look through the mizen-shroud, and pretty blue he got, for the bird came abreast of the ship by that time. "Now," says the leftenant, "d'ye think ye'd weather that there point two hours after this, if a gale come on from the nor'west, sir?" "Well," says the first mate, "I daresay we shouldn't--but what o' that?" "Why, if you'd cruised for six months off the coast of Africa, as I've done," says the leftenant, "you'd think there was something ticklish about that white spot in the sky, to nor'west! But on top o' that, the weather-glass is fell a good bit since four bells." "Weather-glass!" the mate says, "why, that don't matter much in respect of a gale, I fancy." Ye must understand, weather-glasses wan't come so much in fashion at that time, except in the royal navy. "Sir," says the mate again, "mind _your_ business, if you've got any, and I'll mind mine!" "If I was you," the leftenant says, "I'd call the captain." "Thank ye," says the mate,--"call the captain for nothing!" "Well," in an hour more the land was quite plain on the starboard bow, and the mate comes aft again to Leftenant Collins. The clouds was beginning to grow out of the clear sky astarn too. "Why, sir," says the mate, "I'd no notion you was a _seaman_ at all! What would you do yourself now, supposin' the case you put a little ago?" "Well, sir," says Mr Collins, "if you'll do it, I'll tell ye, at once----"

At this point of Old Jack's story, however, a cabin-boy came from aft, to say that the captain wanted him. The old seaman knocked the ashes out of his pipe, which he had smoked at intervals in short puffs, put it in his jacket pocket, and got up off the windlass end. "Why, old ship!" said the man-o'-war's-man, "are ye goin' to leave us in the lurch with a _short yarn_?" "Can't help it, bo'", said Old Jack; "orders must be obeyed, ye know," and away he went. "Well, mates," said one, "what was the upshot of it, if the yarn's been overhauled already? I did'nt hear it myself." "Blessed if I know" said several--"Old Jack didn't get the length last time he's got now." "More luck!" said the man-o'-war's-man; "'tis to be hoped he'll finish it next time!"

EASTLAKE'S LITERATURE OF THE FINE ARTS.

We are surrounded by an external world, which it has pleased the great Maker of the universe to clothe with infinite beauty, cognisable to us through the senses, yet scarcely ours, until, by a more intimate appropriation through the mind, we have added ourselves to it, made it a part of, and in some no inconsiderable degree subject to, the will of our own nature. The inventive faculties of the mind gather all within their reach, which it is their province to combine, and remodel, and revivify with human feeling; and thus, by becoming to a limited extent creative ourselves, we are the more enabled to look up, and in admiration adore the divine power that has made all things out of nothing, and the divine goodness which has given us a perception of a portion of His works. Through the senses we know indeed but imperfectly--more imperfectly than those who have not considered the subject will allow. They minister first to our actual wants, presenting few charms and enticements but such as barely suffice to refresh the mind under the weariness of its daily experience. The bulk of mankind are under a hard necessity, which limits their senses to the work of life: were they enlarged to a greater capacity, that work would be the more irksome. The senses are then, like the air we breathe, reduced from an extreme fineness and purity, for the temporary use of yet unpolished humanity. But they are not intended to continue ever in this state of imperfection.

The great business--the providing for the first wants of life--done, industry is rewarded not by absolute rest and idleness, but by the succession of new and higher wants, which the growing mind demands; and it accordingly taxes the senses, and gives them command to be purveyors, and cultivates them for the purpose of enlarged gratification. They are thus capable of great extension, and, as it were, of an influx of living power to awaken and spiritualise their dormant or inert matter. All life is in progression: sciences must be discovered; arts must be created; and could we conceive an entirely sluggish and uncultivated social state, how few would see what may be seen, or hear what may be heard! The earth, teeming with sights of wonder, and breathed over with a divine music, would be to its inhabitants, in such a condition, but a waste and thankless wilderness. And which is nature--the bare, the imperceptible, for any beauty it contains, or the riches of the mind's discovery, the imaginative creation? We are inventive, that we may discover what nature is; nor is that the less, but rather the more, nature which is art. Art is but nature discovered--the hidden brought to light, and home to us, and acknowledged and felt--more or less felt as we cultivate reciprocally the mind through the senses, and the senses through the mind. With this view, all the artificial enchantments of life are nature--all arts, all sciences: for how could they be to embellish society,--indeed without which there would be no _society_--had they not an independent existence somewhere in the great storehouse of infinity, and were they not bountifully thrown out to us as truths to gather, as fruits to nourish and to gratify? We would wish to vindicate all nature, and unfetter it from that petty distinction which many are fond of drawing between nature and art. These make but one whole. For why should we separate ourselves, with all our faculties, perceptive and inventive, from our intimate and purposed connexion with the great universe? It is nature, because it is every where man's doing, to write and act plays, to compose music, and to paint pictures, raise noble edifices, and make marble seem to live in statues. And besides, as man himself is the chief work of nature, so is that which he does, even out of a partial imitation of other nature, the more natural, as it to a certain degree recedes from its model, and participates in and adopts the feeling of him that makes it. It is this nature which makes beauty perfect--which renders the music of Handel better than the sounds of winds and waters, and of a higher nature than they, as it is of a more extensive power, in all variety of movement, to touch our feelings, and stir us at will. And such is poetry, which influences us where fact fails. And all this not by mere imitation, which some are so fond of thrusting forward as the means; for there is nothing quite like to itself. With such means of exquisite enjoyment within our reach--by this enlargement of the boundary of our senses, of entering upon the improved faculties of our minds--it does seem strange that any gifted with leisure and understanding should neglect the cultivation of arts and sciences, which offer in the pursuit and in the attainment such unlimited riches. It is as if an heir to a large and beautiful estate, a mansion opulent in treasures, should willingly turn his back upon his inheritance, and be content to live in a hovel, and habitate with swine that feed him. And so it is when life, that might be thus embellished and enjoyed, is worse than wasted in low pursuits, and in those meaner gratifications which the untutored senses supply.

We hold that a real taste for the Fine Arts is the _acme_ of a nation's civilisation, and a greater, a more general happiness, the certain result. We hold, too, that it is a creature of growth--that it may spring up where once sown and tended with care, in apparently the most unpromising soils. The revival of arts and of letters took place in "Agresti Latio." And how is the whole world benefited by that era of cultivation! There is no country under the sun that so much stands in need of an education in the Arts as our own. With energy to produce, and wealth at command, where shall we look for more favouring national circumstances? This country has been the mart where the finest productions of the genius of other times have found the most liberal purchasers, neglected sadly by our governments; individual collectors have enriched the nation. If we have suffered too many of the finest works--the purchase of which would have been as nothing out of the public purse--to leave our shores, and now to be the ornament of foreign galleries; yet our private collectors are so numerous, that at least a love for the arts has been more generally disseminated. But we have had no previous education to qualify us for the taste which we would possess. There have been no great works, to which the public eye could be directed, growing up amongst us. Hitherto we have had no Vaticans to embellish, and our temples have been closed against the hand of genius; yet are we now, as it were, upon the turning-point of the character of our cultivation: there is a general stir, a common talk about art, an expressed interest, an almost universal appetence in that direction. We are perfectly surprised at the very large sums which have been recently given for works of even moderate pretensions. There is much to observe that indicates the general desire, but less that indicates a general knowledge. There is an incipient taste, but there is a great want,--education--education for art and in art. How is this to be promoted? The lectures of academies are thought to be exclusively for the professors or rather students, and are too often neglected by them. The lectures of Sir Joshua, of Fuseli, and others, contain much valuable matter, but they scarcely reach the public. The most interesting foreign publications remain untranslated. Vasari is as yet unknown in our language. Transcripts, in outline or in more full engraving, of the finest works, exist not among us: these are the things that should be before the eyes of all, together with a systematic reading education upon the principles. Whatever has been done that is great, that is ennobling, should be, as far as is possible, seen and known. As yet, in all this, there is a great deficiency. The public is left to, at best, an incipient taste; which, to judge from the kind of productions that find the readiest market, is not good--at all events is not high, and scarcely improving. The love is at present for picture imitation, that lowest condition in which art may be said to flourish. We want an education in its principles, that its just aim and proper influence may be understood. The Fine Arts should be a part of our literature, and thus become a branch of general education. We hail with pleasure every work of the kind we see announced; we rejoice in the publication of our "hand-books," and the many volumes on the arts, as they flourished in other countries, which now begin in some measure to interest the reading public. But is nothing done towards a foundation for education in the principles of the arts? We are happy to say there is much done. If the commission on the Fine Arts had done nothing more than the drawing up their "reports" by their secretary, in that they have done much. Valuable, however, as these "reports" are, they were nearly a dead letter: the title was not enticing; few looked to reports as other than statistical accounts; whereas, in reality, they contained deep research, accurate knowledge, and clearly set forth the principles upon which, as a foundation, true taste must rest. We are happy that these most able essays have been rescued from the common fate of "reports," by their being now preserved in a collected form, together with other most valuable treatises from the pen of the secretary to the commission, under the title of _Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts_. Mr Eastlake has conscientiously imposed upon himself an arduous undertaking, beyond the implied condition of his secretaryship. In so doing, he deserves the greatest commendation, for he has greatly increased the utility of the commission. Not content with promoting the arts by these excellent theoretical treatises, he has addressed the artists themselves, and led them to the best practical views. He has, with great industry, labour, and patient investigation, cleared away the common errors respecting the "Old Masters." We have already noticed his _History of Painting in Oil_--that is, the first volume, which treats of the practice of the Flemish school. It is now no matter of conjecture what colours or what vehicles were in use--we have sure documentary evidence before us. It remains to make known the alterations and additions to that practice by the Italian schools, and this will be the subject of his forthcoming volume. In the first work, indeed, we have glimpses of the Italian method, and recipes of the varnish supposed to be used by Correggio; but we look to certain information, which is the fair promise of the second volume.

In the _Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts_, in addition to the essays on painting, sculpture, and architecture, taken from the "reports," we have Mr Eastlake's review of Passavant's _Life of Raphael_, extracted from the _Quarterly Review_; notes from Kugler's _Hand-Book_, on the subject of the paintings in the Capella Sistina; extracts from the translation of Goethe's _Theory of Colours_, on the Decoration of a Villa; and, perhaps the most interesting of all, if we may not say the most important, a fragment on "The Philosophy of the Fine Arts," not noticed in the chapter of contents. To this last, being so entirely speculative upon the very cause of beauty, and so new in matter, we should feel disposed to invite discussion on the side of doubt--partly because, it being professedly a fragment, by suggesting the difficulties attending his theory, a clearer exposition in the further prosecution of it may be the result.

If it were not, so to speak, for the genius of materials--or if genius be not allowed, we may say the characteristics of materials--poetry, painting, and sculpture would be subject but to one order of criticism, under one set of rules. But though each has its agreement with the others in the same leading principles--the foundation of general taste, and mostly arising from moral considerations--yet have they, individually, their own diverging points, from which they seem freed from the "commune vinculum." It requires a nice discrimination to ascertain for each art these points of deviation from the general rules. These rules are, from observation and from books, more easily comprehended, and the common scope of all the arts understood; but, to an inquiring mind, difficulties will often present themselves, when seeming differences and contradictions occur; for undoubtedly all these arts must be reconciled with each other, and made akin. It becomes, therefore, an important step in the education of taste, to learn the necessarily different modes by which they each approach their ends--the same as far as the general principles are concerned, but with a variance according to the characteristics of each. Mr Eastlake has been very successful in pointing to these distinctions, in showing the rules which guide all, and those which necessitate the differences. We were particularly struck with this discrimination in his _Treatise on Sculpture_, than which we have never read any thing more clear and convincing. We quote a passage with this bearing:--

"The first question, then, in examining the style of a given art, is, in what does this difference of means, as compared with nature, consist? The answer may for the present be confined to sculpture. It is agreed, then, or it is a _convention_, that a colourless hard substance shall be the material with which the sculptor shall imitate the perfection of life. His means are, by the primary condition, effectually distinguished from those of nature; and it remains for him to cheat the imagination (not the senses) into the pleasing impression that an equivalent to nature can be so produced. He may, therefore, imitate the characteristics of life closely. His select representation, however faithful, is in no danger of being literally confounded with reality, because of the original conventions, viz., the absence of colour, and the nature of his material. But it is not the same with the imitation, in this art, of many other surfaces. As already observed, a rock in sculpture and a rock in nature can be identical; it may, therefore, be sometimes necessary to imitate the reality less closely, or even, in extreme cases, like that now adduced, to depart from nature. The reason is obvious: the degree of resemblance to reality which is attainable in the principal object of imitation--the surface of the living figure--is, from the established convention, limited; and it is desirable that the spectator should forget this restriction. He is, therefore, by no means to be reminded of it by greater reality in other, and necessarily inferior, parts of the work. In painting, it is sometimes objected that inferior objects are more real than the flesh. The defect is great; but there is this difference between the two cases--in painting, the inferiority in the imitation of the flesh may be only from want of power in the artist; in sculpture, the perfect resemblance of the flesh to nature is impossible, in consequence of the absence of colour. The literal imitation of subordinate objects is, for this reason, more offensive in sculpture than in painting. A manifest defect in the art seems more hopeless than a defect in the artist."

"In pursuing the analogies here I considered, it is necessary to compare mere art with art--the form, as such, of the one, with the form of the other. Thus, in comparing sculpture and poetry together, the parallel conditions are to be sought in the strictly corresponding departments. As sculpture, in reference to nature, (to repeat an observation before made,) gives substance for substance, so poetry gives words for words. Accordingly, the form of poetry is by agreement or convention (similar in principle to that which dictates the conditions of sculpture) effectually distinguished from the form of ordinary language. And it will now be seen that the limitations of poetry, in such outward characteristics, are more definite and more comprehensive than those of sculpture; for whereas the material of marble may sometimes coincide literally with that of substances in nature, the form of poetry never can entirely coincide with that of ordinary language. This greater liability of sculpture to be confounded with reality certainly adds to its difficulty, since the doubtful cases, which may be left to the taste of the sculptor, are often settled by an immutable rule for the poet."

Whoever would desire a knowledge of the original causes of the differences of alto, basso, and mezzo relievo, should read the admirable treatise on the subject. They are not to be confounded as arising from the same conditions, and subject to the same rules. The differences of position and light, by their distinct requirements, separate the three styles of relievo, the alto, basso, and mezzo. It is not, as many suppose, that the basso, the lower relief, is less finished than the alto, or high relief; the finish of each is differently placed. "In the highest relief, however decided the shadows may, and must of necessity be, on the plane to which the figure is attached, the light on the figure itself is kept as unbroken as possible; and this can only be effected by a selection of open attitudes; that is, such an arrangement of the limbs as shall not cast shadows on the figure itself. In basso-relievo, the same general effect of the figure is given, but by very different means: the attitude is not selected to avoid shadows on the figure, because, while the extreme outline is strongly marked, the shadows within it may be in a great measure suppressed; so that the choice of attitudes is greater. Mezzo-relievo differs from both; it has neither the limited attitudes of the first, nor the distinct outline and suppressed internal markings of the second: on the contrary, the outline is often less distinct than the forms within it, and hence it requires, and is fitted for, near inspection. Its imitation may thus be more absolute, and its execution more finished, than those of the other styles."

In all relievo, as the shadows fall upon the background, the peculiar adaptation to architecture is manifest. As they are intended for minute inspection, gems are generally in mezzo-relievo. The workers in bronze and the goldsmiths--the former from the facility in casting, the latter for the minuteness and less distinctness of their works--adopting the flattest kind of mezzo-relievo, fancifully deviated from the original purity of the style, by introducing landscape and building backgrounds. An artist of the greatest genius fell into this error--Lorenzo Ghiberti, in the beautiful bronze doors of the baptistery of San Giovanni at Florence. In these celebrated compositions he attempted the union of basso-relievo with the principles of painting. His excellent workmanship and skill in composition was such as led the sculptors of the fifteenth century to consider this innovation upon the old simplicity an improvement. In inferior hands the failure would have been manifest, for the practice is in violation of the principle which the character of the material should determine. That Ghiberti was led into the error is not surprising, as he learned his art from a goldsmith. In his case it was a singular instance of ill-constituted judges choosing well. The judges who selected Ghiberti from his many competitors, were goldsmiths, painters, and sculptors--the majority were likely to favour that which approached nearest to their own practice. It is to the credit of our Flaxman that he revived the purer taste. This whole essay on relievo should be read attentively: it is so connected in all its parts that it is impossible to give its true character by either a few quotations or an at tempt at analysis.

In the essay entitled "Painting," Mr Eastlake keeps in view throughout the main object of the commission--the decoration of public buildings. He has to show how certain principles of art adjust themselves to the conditions imposed by the dimensions, light, and general character of the buildings for which works are required. At first view it might appear that, whether a picture be large or small, there should be no difference in the manner of painting it--that the small magnified, or the large reduced, could answer every purpose. But not so: a moment's consideration will show that the spectator's eye must be consulted, which sees not minutiæ of form or colour at the distance from which large works are to be seen, and that it seeks for those as the objects are brought nearer. It becomes necessary, then, in large works, lest they be indistinct, that masses be strongly preserved, and, accordingly, that neither forms nor colours be much broken. Hence, the larger the work, in general, the lighter, for the sake of distinctness, it should be: and such is the character of the great fresco works, which are, besides, in this respect, mainly aided by the materials of fresco, which is non-absorbent of light. We believe this also to be true to nature; for if we reduce any scene of nature by a diminishing glass to very small dimensions, the quantity of colour, which is never lost, becomes concentrated, and therefore more intense. The Flemish masters were great observers of nature; and we find in their smallest pictures the greatest depth and intensity of colour. Colour, in this view, even contends powerfully with perspective itself, and is often in distance, by being to the eye reduced, of an intensity that would seem to contradict aërial influence. The phenomenon of the strength of bright colour in distance is extremely curious: every one must have noticed that a lighted candle may be seen miles off, where, according to perspective rules, it would not be possible to draw its dimensions; nay, it shall appear larger than when at a moderate distance, and that not from its being a magnified light reflected from the walls of a room, for the same effect will be observed if we see the single light in the midst of a dark wood, where it is reflected not at all, and even seen in a space which, without the candle, would be too small to be discernible. But the contrary effect takes place with regard to form, which becomes indistinct at a very small distance. A bright colour is frequently very distinct, where the form to which it belongs is lost. But to return to the essay. Mr Eastlake clearly shows the principles, with regard to colour, upon which the great Venetian masters worked--how, by what artificial means, they preserved colour without losing light. To their practice and modelling in fresco were the Venetians indebted for the largeness of their system of colouring, and probably to the rich specimens of painted glass, for which Venice was celebrated, for their brilliancy and illumination. This little treatise is peculiarly useful to those who would aspire to undertake public works of large dimensions, and could not have been offered to their notice by a more fit person than the Secretary to the Commission of the Fine Arts. The following is excellent:--"To conclude: the resources, whether abundant or limited, of the imitative arts, are, in relation to nature, necessarily incomplete; but it appears that, in the best examples, the very means employed to compensate for their incompleteness are, in each case, the source of a characteristic perfection, and the foundation of a specific style. As it is with the arts, compared with each other, so it is with the various applications of a given art: the methods employed to correct the incompleteness or indistinctness, which may be the result of particular conditions, are, in the works of the great masters, the cause of excellencies not attainable to the same extent by any other means. In the instance last mentioned--the school of the Netherlands--it is apparent that no indirect contrivances or conventions are necessary to counteract the effects of indistinctness; on the contrary, all that would be indistinct in other modes of representation is here admissible, with scarcely any restriction. The incompleteness to be overcome, which is here the cause of peculiar attractions, therefore resides solely in conditions and imperfections of the art itself, which, on near inspection, are in greater danger of being remembered. These are--a flat surface, and material pigments; and these are precisely the circumstances which, by the skill of the artists in the works referred to, are forgotten by the spectator. The consequences of the difficulty overcome are, as usual, among the characteristic perfections of the style."

_Passavant's Life of Raphael_[15] is by far the most satisfactory account of that great and too short-lived painter. It deservedly engaged the attention of Mr Eastlake, who, in his review, has, in an able summary, connected the genius of this extraordinary man with the influence of his times and the place of his birth. Hitherto the school of Umbria has been too much overlooked. Yet Urbino, at the time of Raphael's birth, more than rivalled in art Rome and Florence. The palace built there by Duke Federigo was not only magnificent in itself, but was adorned with treasures of art. Federigo was to this "Athens of Umbria" what Cosmo and Lorenzo de Medici were to Florence. It is not the least interesting fact, that Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi, was the historian of its greatness, which he celebrates in a poem, in which the painters of fame are not omitted. It is probable that the early mind of Raphael grew there under the influence of classic art, for many were the treasures of Grecian sculpture there collected. The idea is ably combated by Mr Eastlake, that Italian art was independent of this classic influence, as attempted to be proved by the German school, who wrote to establish the entire independence of early Christian art. The classic influence was felt by Raphael, and by him promoted. It was indeed Giotto who, a century before, had set the example of emancipating art from the previous formal types--animating, as it were, the "_dead bones_" of art.

[15] We here adopt the spelling of the name as we find it in Mr Eastlake's review of that Life.

The young Raphael, an orphan at twelve years of age, had probably been an early scholar with his father, Giovanni Santi, and was, soon after his father's death, placed with Perugino. He must have seen at Urbino a work of Van Eyck's, which Duke Federigo had procured. Giovanni Santi calls the inventor of oil-painting "Il gran Johannes." Among the painters celebrated by Santi is Gentile, of whom Michael-Angelo said, when he had seen a Madonna and Child painted by him, that "he had a hand like his name." The young Raphael was then favourably circumstanced in his earliest years. He remained at Urbino and in Perugia till twenty-one years of age, 1504; was then at Florence till 1508; and from that time to his death, 1520, with the exception of a visit to Florence, he was at Rome.[16] A very interesting account of many of the works of this great man is added. The "Raphael ware," so commonly believed to be designed by Raphael, was nevertheless not his work. These designs were executed twenty years after his death. Raffaello del Colla was one employed in these designs. The name probably gave rise to the surmise that they were from the hand of Raphael.

[16] In page 215, it is said Raphael repaired to his native city at the age of twenty-one. This seems not to agree with the account of his not having left it till twenty-one years of age. It has been said also, at page 210, that he revisited Urbino in 1499, having been said not to have left it till 1504.

Of the nature of the intercourse between Raphael and the Fornarina, whatever may be the conjectures, not only is no additional information brought forward, but there is every reason to believe the previous statements to be fable, manufactured according to the love for romance so common both to readers and authors. Whether the name La Fornarina implies that she was a potter's or a baker's daughter, there is still a doubt. Nor does it much concern the history of art, nor the real character of the biography, as it should be, of such a man, to sift the gossip of the idle or curious of any age. Passavant clearly vindicates the life of Raphael from the general impurities which such gossip has ever been as busy as desirous to attach to the names of men of genius. The jealousy said to have existed between M. Angelo and Raphael, probably had some origin in the impetuous temper of M. Angelo, who confounded the gentle Raphael with his architectural rival, Bramante. That Raphael owed something to M. Angelo cannot be doubted, but no unfair imitation has been proved--nay, we would venture to assert, that unfair imitation is almost impossible to genius, for it will make its own, whatever, to an indiscriminating eye, it seems only to borrow. It was not possible that Raphael should not be influenced even in his style by that of M. Angelo. No painter can come to any perfection in his art utterly ignorant or uninfluenced by the works of others, whether predecessors or contemporaries. Nor was Raphael slow to express himself as happy in being born in the age of M. Angelo. "Whatever Raphael knew in the art, he knew from me," said M. Angelo. We do not view this as a censure, but a praise; for it shows an admission on the part of that giant of art, that the genius of Raphael was worthy the affiliation. We have sufficient evidence, we think, of the originality, of the greatness, and of the more tender virtue--gentleness--of Raphael in his works. To those who would seek more, we would refer to the letter of Raphael himself, and more especially to the touching pictures of his genius and character as we find them in Vasari, and in the heartfelt regretting, at his death, of his friend Castiglione.

The doubts raised a few years since respecting the place of Raphael's burial have been removed. The tomb has been found, as described by Vasari, behind the altar of the church of Sta Maria Bella Rotonda, (the Pantheon,) "in a chapel which he himself had built and endowed, and near the spot where his betrothed bride had been laid." The tomb was opened in the presence of the members of the academy of St Luke, who were not a little interested in the investigation, having been long in possession of a supposed skull of Raphael, which the character-casting phrenologists had, in their zeal for their theory, held up to admiration, and as a test of the accuracy of their science. It must have been to their no small mortification that their relic was discovered to have "belonged to an individual of no celebrity." We reluctantly pass over the interesting notes from Kugler's _Hand-Book_ "on the subjects of the paintings in the Capella Sistina."

To the artist, the "Extracts from the translation of Goethe's _Theory of Colours_ will be most valuable. The usual diagrams of the chromatic circle are shown to have one great defect. "The opposite colours--red and green, yellow and purple, olive and orange--are made equal in intensity; whereas the complemental colour, pictured on the retina, is always less vivid, and always darker or lighter than the original colour. This variety undoubtedly accords more with harmonious effects in painting." To indirect opposition of colours--the opposition should not only be of the colours, the hues, but in their intensity--"the opposition of two pure hues of equal intensity, differing only in the abstract quality of colour, would immediately be pronounced crude and inharmonious. It would not, however, be strictly correct to say that such a contrast is too violent; on the contrary, it appears that the contrast is not carried far enough, for, though differing in colour, the two hues may be exactly similar in purity and intensity. Complete contrast, on the other hand, supposes dissimilarity in all respects. In addition to the mere difference of hue, the eye, it seems, requires difference in the lightness or darkness of the hue." Artists who are so partial to extreme light--a white light--and, at the same time, of exhibiting vivid, strong, and crude colours, are far more unnatural in their effects than those who prefer altogether the lower scale. In fact, it is the lower scale which can alone truly show colours,--very vivid light and colour cannot co-exist. Colour is called by Kircher "_lumen opacatum_." That increase of colour supposes increase of darkness, so often stated by Goethe, may be granted without difficulty. To what extent, on the other hand, increase of darkness--or rather diminution of light--is accompanied by increase of colour, is a question which has been variously answered by various schools. The reconcilement of Goethe's theory with the practice of the best of the great Venetian colourists, is shown with much critical discrimination.

Leonardo da Vinci, the obscurity and want of arrangement of whose treatises are so much to be regretted, had, as is shown by the juxtaposition of passages, borrowed largely from Aristotle. It is agreed by both, that when light is overspread with obscurity, a red colour appears; the why remains for the more accurate investigation of philosophers. The blue of the sky arises from the interposition of white against the black. The following from Leonardo is curious,--"This (effect of transparent colours on various grounds) is evident in smoke, which is blue when seen against black, but when it is opposed to the light, (blue sky), it appears brownish and reddening."

The letter "On the decoration of a villa" comes very opportunely. Architecture, with all its accompanying decoration of furniture and ornament, has been with us for nearly two centuries in abeyance. The taste is reviving, and with it knowledge. The science is studied, and with the extension of the science, convenience, which had long been the sole aim, and inadequately pursued, is in advance. There is much to be done, not only in villas and mansions, the houses of the rich, but in those of the moderate citizens. It too often happens that families are weary of their homes, they know not why--fly off to watering-places for a little novelty--establish themselves in inconvenient lodging-houses--all, in reality, because they lack a little variety at home. We have seen houses, where most of the rooms are not only of the same dimensions, but are, as near as possible, coloured, papered, painted and furnished alike: the eye is wearied with the perpetually obtruding sameness, and the eye faithfully conveys this disgust to the mind. We may be thought to have whimsical notions in this respect, yet we venture to the confession of a somewhat singular taste. Had we wealth at command, we would borrow something from every country and climate under the sun. We would enter subterranean palaces with the ancient Egyptians, all artificially lighted. Arabians, Greeks, and Romans should contribute architectural designs. Our house should represent, in this sense, a map of the world: we would inhabit Europe, Asia, Africa, America--(no, scarcely the latter)--yet without being shocked by too sudden transitions; though we would retain somewhat of this electrifying source of revivifying the too slumbering spirits. We would be able to walk "the great circle, and be still at home." We would create every gradation of light, and every gradation of darkness, to suit or to make every humour of the mind. We would have gardens such as few but Aladdin saw; and who less than a genie, or most consummate of geniuses, should complete our last unfinished window?--unfinished; for, with all this, it would still be a blessing to have something to do. And a pleasant thing to be the lord, master, emperor, in an architectural world of acres. Who does not love the lordly spirit of Wolsey? but we would go beyond him--would, as well as the imperial palace, have the poet's house, the painter's house; and in their works, all their works, (we are becoming as ambitious as Alnaschar,) be in daily familiarity with the great and wise of every age. Our libraries--we speak plurally, in the magnificence of the great idea--our picture-galleries, statue-galleries, should tax the skill of purveyors and architectural competitors without end. None that have ever yet been built or supplied with treasures would suffice, for they are for cramped positions. We would have no lack of space, and would not mind building a room for a single work. The idea of magic to construct, only shows the real want of man. Magic is but a prenomen to genius. Did we learn all this extravagance from our early story-books of princes and princesses, and their fairy palaces--from Arabian tales, and, in later time, from the enchantments of Boyardo and Ariosto? Whatever were the sources--though it should turn out to have been but an old nurse--we are heartily thankful for these variable, fanciful treasures; and, had we the riches, in reality would add a further extravagance of cost and fancy--a mausoleum to her bewitching bones. We remember thinking Menelaus, as pictured in the _Agamemnon_ of Æschylus, happy even in his grief for the loss of Helen, in that he paced his galleries gazing upon her statues.

"Ma ritorniamo al nostro usato canto."

For more practical views and uses, we refer those who would build and decorate houses of pretensions and taste to the good sense contained in Mr Eastlake's _Reply_.

It seems to be scarcely a fable that beauty (as often personified in romantic poetry) is hid in an enchanted castle that few can reach; and those fortunate few either see but the skirts of her robe, as she majestically passes from corridor to corridor, or are so bewildered with the sight, that, having worshipped with downward eyes, they can give but a poor account of that "vultus nimium lubricus aspici;" while many of the adventurers are at once overcome by the monsters of error that in every shape sentinel the bridge and turret; while others, scarcely on the verge of the precincts, gather a few flowers, and come away under the delusion that they have entered the true garden of all enchantment. Some are fascinated with the "false Duennas" that assume a shape of beauty, and lead them far away, to their utter bewilderment; and these never return to the real pursuit.--There are who meet with fellow adventurers, accompany each other but a short way, dispute about the route they should take, breathe a combative atmosphere in the byepaths of error, and had rather slaughter each other than continue the adventure. Such seems to have been the thought of Mr Eastlake, in the commencement of his fragment "On the Philosophy of the Fine Arts," which he has clothed in more sober prose becoming the combatant for Truth--for Truth and Beauty are one. He has been out upon the adventure--yet scarcely thinks himself safe from the weapons of combatants, old or new, the discomfited or the aspirant, and expects little credit will be given to the discoveries he professes to have made. "To hint at theories of taste," he asserts, "is to invite opposition. The reader who gives his attention to them at all is eager to be an objector; he sets out by fancying that his liberty is in danger, and instinctively prepares to resist the supposed aggression." We would by no means break a lance with one so skilful, and of such proof-armour, as that which this accomplished combatant wears; but we may venture to gather up the fragments of the broken lances that strew the field, and patch them up for other hands--nay, offer them, with the humility of a runner in the field, to Mr Eastlake himself, who will, on good occasion, show of what wood and metal they are made. To carry on this idea of enchantment, it is possible that Mr Eastlake may resemble the happy prince in search of the ninth statue. Eight had been set up (we are not quite sure of the number): there they stood on their pedestals of finest marble, but they were cold to the touch. The prince in the tale found the ninth he was commanded to discover to be a living beauty. If we mistake not, Mr Eastlake considers beauty but the type of life. "Life is pre-eminently an element of beauty: the word itself presents at once to the imagination the ideas of movement, of energy, and of bloom: the fact itself constitutes the greatest and most admirable attribute of nature." Again, establishing the curve, though not the precise curve of Hogarth, as the line of beauty, "a variously undulating curve may therefore be proposed as the visible type of life: such a form is constantly found in nature, as the indication and concomitant of life itself. It was this which Hogarth detected in various examples, without tracing it to its source. His illustrations are often excellent, but the type itself he adopted was singularly unfortunate. His "line of beauty" constantly repeats itself, and is therefore devoid of variety or elasticity--the never-failing accompaniments of perfect vitality." Variation, whether of line or of other elements, has on all hands been admitted as an ingredient of beauty. Mr Burke's illustration of the dove is good: "Here we see the head increasing insensibly to the middle, from whence it lessens gradually until it mixes with the neck; the neck loses itself in a larger swell, which continues to the middle of the body, when the whole decreases again to the tail. The tail takes a new direction, but it soon varies its new course; it blends again with the other parts, and the line is perpetually changing above, below, upon every side." Burke adds to this the other element--softness--which, we suspect, Mr Eastlake will admit only in a minor degree; for Mr Burke considers not only softness, but a certain degree of weakness--a delicacy almost amounting to it, at least--as necessary to the idea of beauty; and they would ill agree with the perfect "vitality" of our author.

But simply as to lines, we are inclined to believe with Burke, that though the varied line is that in which beauty is found most complete, there is no particular line which constitutes it. Mr Eastlake, in referring that line to its resemblance to life, or to the antagonistic principles that make and destroy life, if we mistake not, cautiously abstracts this line of beauty from ideas of association; whereas his whole argument, in form and matter, appears to be one of association only. But such an association of life may be, if it existed, often destructive of that impression which a beautiful object is intended to make. Lassitude, death itself, may be beautiful in form. When Virgil compares Euryalus dying to the flower cut down--to the poppies drooping, weighed down with rain--he has in his eye objects beautiful in themselves; rather than life, they express Burke's idea of a certain weakness and faintness.

Inque humeros cervix collapsa recumbit. Purpureus veluti cum flos succisus aratro, Languescit moriens; lassove papavera collo, Demisere caput, pluviâ cùm fortè gravantur.

Perhaps Mr Eastlake may reply, that the simile expresses _privation_ of life, and therefore shows the matter capable of receiving it; but this appears further to involve the necessity of association, which denies the beauty of the line _per se_. The idea of privation is a sentiment; but the question is, if there be _a_ line of beauty independent of sentiment or association. Let us attempt to answer it by another--the opposite. Is there _a_ line of ugliness? We think there is not: if there be, what line? certainly not a straight line, (we must not here refer any to an object.) Perhaps we may not be very wrong in saying that _a_ line _per se_ is one of "indifference"--similar to that state of the mind before, as Burke says, we receive either pain or pleasure. May we not further say that, very strictly speaking, there is no one line but the straight--that every figure is made up of its inclinations, which are other or equivalent to other lines? If there be any truth in this, the "line of beauty" (here adopting for a moment the word) is not a single but a complicated thing: the straight line has no parts, until we make them by divisions: the curved line has parts by its deviations, which constitute a kind of division, without the abruptness which the divided straight line would have. The organ of sight requires a moving instinct: that instinct is curiosity; but that is of an inquiring, progressive nature. Without some variety, therefore, in the object, it would die ere it could give birth to pleasurable sensation. It is too suddenly set to rest by a straight line _per se_; but when that line is combined with others, the sense is kept awake, is exercised; and it is from the exercise of a sense that pleasure arises. Too sudden divisions, by multiplying one object, distract; but in the curve, in the very variety, the unity of the object is preserved. A real cause may possibly here exist for what we will still call a "line of beauty," without referring it at all to so complicated a machinery of thought as that of life, with its antagonistic principle, with which it continually contends. This is, doubtless, physically and philosophically true; but it is altogether a thought which gives beauty to the idea of the line after we have contemplated it--not before. The line may rather give rise to and illustrate the philosophical thought, than be made what it is by that thought, which it altogether precedes.

Mr Eastlake objects to Hogarth's line that it repeats itself. We are not quite satisfied of the validity of this objection: for we find a certain repetition the constant rule of nature--a repetition not of identity, but similarity--an imitation rather, which constitutes symmetry--which, again, is a kind of correspondence, or, to clothe it with a moral term, a sympathy. To this symmetry, when a freedom of action is given, it but makes a greater variety; for we never lose sight of the symmetry, the balancing quantity always remaining. Thus, though a man move one arm up, the other down, the balance of the symmetry is not destroyed by the motion. We know that the alternation may take place,--that the arms may shift positions: we never lose sight of the correspondence, of the similarity. Every exterior swell in the limb has its corresponding interior swell. The enlargement by a joint is not one-sided. Every curve has its opposite. The face exemplifies it, which, as it is the most beautiful part, has the least flexible power of shifting its symmetry. Mark how the oval is completed by the height of the forehead and the declination of the chin. In nature it will be mostly found that, when one line rises, there is an opposite that falls,--that where a line contracts to a point, its opposite contracts to meet it. And this is the pervading principle of the curve carried out, and is most complete when the circle or oval is formed, for then the symmetrical or sympathetic line is perfected. Let us see how nature paints herself. Let us suppose the lake a mirror, as her material answering to our canvass. We see this repetition varied only by a faintness or law of perspective, which, to the eye, in some degree changes the line from its perfect exactness. As we see, we admire. There is no one insensible to this beauty. Nay, we would go further, and say that the artist cannot at random draw any continuous set of lines that, as forms, shall be ugly, if he but apply to them this imitation principle of nature, which, as it is descriptive of the thing, may be termed the principle of Reflexion, and which we rather choose, because it seems to include two natural propensities not very unlike each other--imitation and sympathy. We say "not very unlike each other," because they strictly resemble each other only in humanity. The brute may have the one--imitation, as in the monkey; but he imitates without sympathy, therefore we love him not: and it is this lack which makes his imitation mostly mischievous, for evil acts are the more visible,--the good discernible by feeling, by sympathy. The sympathy of the symmetry of nature is its sentiment, and may therefore be at least an ingredient in beauty, and thus exhibited in lines. Lines similar, that approach or recede from each other, do so by means of their similarity in a kind of relation to each other; and by this they acquire a purpose, a meaning, as it were, a sentient feeling, or, as we may say, a sympathy. A line of itself is nothing--it has no vital being, no form, until it bear relation to some other, or, by its combination with another, becomes a figure; and because it is a figure, it pleases, and we in some degree sympathise with it, as a part, with ourselves, of things created. Thus the curve, or Hogarth's line of beauty, which we assume to be made up of straight lines, whose joining is imperceptible, is the first designated figure of such lines, and in it we first recognise form, the first essential of organic being and beauty. It is like order dawning through chaos,--life not out of death, but out of that unimaginable nothing, before death was or could be. It is the Aphrodite discarding the unmeaning froth and foam, and rising altogether admirable. Now again as to Hogarth's line--carried but a little further, it would be strictly according to this principle of Reflexion. Divide it by an imaginary line, and you see it as in a mirror. If the serpentine line, then, as Hogarth called it, be a line of beauty, let us see in what that line is rendered most beautiful. Let us take the caduceus of Hermes as the mystic symbol of beauty. Here we see strictly the principle of reflexion, (for it matters not whether lateral or perpendicular,) and here, as a separation, how beautiful is the straight line! Take away either serpent, where is the beauty? We have a natural love of order as well as of variety,--of balancing one thing with another. If we remember, Hogarth falls into the error of making it a principle of art to shun regularity, and recommends a practice, which painters of architectural subjects have, as we think, erroneously adopted, of taking their views away from a central point. The principle of reflexion of nature would imply that they lose thereby more than they gain, for they lose that complete order which was in the design of the architect, and which, by not disturbing, so aids the sense of repose--a source of greatness as well as beauty. But to return to this Reflexion. It has its resemblance to Memory, which gives pleasure simply by reflecting the past,--by imitating through sympathy. We are pleased with similitudes, when placed in opposition. They are, like the two sides of Apollo's lyre, divided only by lines that, through them, discourse music,--harmony or agreement making one out of many things. The painter knows well that he requires his balancing lines to bring all intermediate parts into the idea of an embracing whole. If any of Hogarth's lines, as given examples in his plate, (though he gives the preference to one,) had its corresponding, as in the caduceus, it would at once become a beautiful line.

We took occasion some years ago, in a paper in Maga, to notice the practice, according to this principle of nature, followed by perhaps as great a master of composition (of lines) as any that art has produced--Gaspar Poussin; and we exemplified the rule by reference to some of his pictures; and we remarked that, by this his practice, he made more available for variety and uniformity the space of his canvass. We have since, with much attention, noticed the lines of nature, when most beautiful,--have watched the clouds, how they have arched valleys, and promoted a correspondence of sentiment,--and how, in woods, the receding and approaching lines of circles have made the meetings and the hollows, which both make space, and are agreeable. We are not setting forth _our_ line of beauty. We would rather suggest that it is possible the idea of the wave or curve, right in itself, may be carried to a still greater completeness. It may, in fact, only be a part of beauty, which must scarcely be limited to a single line, or rather figure. We should have hesitated, lest we should seem to have hazarded a crude theory, if it had appeared to be entirely in opposition to Mr Eastlake. We think, upon the whole view, it rather advances his, and reconciles it as a part only with that of Burke and Hogarth. The thing stated may be true, when the reason given for it may be untrue, or at least insufficient. The notion of life and its antagonism is true; but its application may be more ingenious, and in the nature of a similitude, than an absolute foundation; for many similar referable correspondences of ideas may be given, as the range of similitude is large. But the objection to them is that they are mental, and will not, therefore, apply unconditionally in a theory from which we set out by abstracting association.

Nor can we go so far as to carry this idea of "life" into the theory of colour.

"Colour," says Mr Eastlake, "viewed under the ordinary effects of light and atmosphere, may be considered according to the same general principles. It is first to be observed that, like forms, they may or may not be characteristic, and that no object would be improved by means, however intrinsically agreeable, which are never its own. Next, as to the idea of life: creatures exhibit the hues with which nature has clothed them in greatest brilliancy during the period of consummate life and health. Bright red, which, by universal consent, represents the idea of life, (perhaps from its identity with the hue of the blood,) is the colour which most stimulates the organs of sight."

We doubt if any one colour, as we doubted of any one line, is _the_ colour of beauty; and as to red representing life, possibly by resemblance to blood, speaking to the eye of Art, we should not say that redness is the best exponent of the beautiful flesh of human life. If so, it is most seen in earliest infancy, when it positively displeases. The young bird and young mouse create even disgust from this too visible blood-redness.

What is beauty? is quite another question from that of whether there is _a_ line of beauty. Lines may be pleasing or displeasing, in a degree independent of the objects in which they happen to be. Lines that correspond in symmetry, as well as colours which agree in harmony, may exist in disagreeable objects, leaving yet the question of beauty to be answered; though beauty, whatever it is, may require this correspondence of parts, this order, this sympathy in symmetry.

Burke has separated the sublime from the beautiful. Mr Eastlake has, we suppose intentionally, with a view to his ulterior object, in this fragment omitted any such distinction. He may be the more judicious in this, as Burke admits ugliness into his Sublime.

It has been supposed that the ancient artists studied the forms of inferior animals for the purpose of embellishing the human. The bull and lion have been recognised in the heads of Jupiter and Hercules. Mr Eastlake lays stress upon the necessity in avoiding, in representing the human, every characteristic of the brute; and quotes Sir Charles Bell, who says, "I hold it to be an inevitable consequence of such a comparison, that they should discover that the perfection of the human form was to be attained by avoiding what was characteristic of the inferior animals, and increasing the proportions of those features which belong to man."

This is doubtless well put; but there is an extraordinary fact that seems to remove this characteristic peculiarity from the idea of beauty, however it may add it to the idea of perfection. Man is the only risible animal: risibility may be said, therefore, to be his distinguishing mark. If so, far from attributing any beauty to it, even when we admit its agreeability, we deny its beauty,--we even see in it distortion. Painters universally avoid representing it. They prefer the

"Santo, onesto, e grave ciglio."

Some have thought the smile, so successfully rendered by Correggio, the letting down of beauty into an inferior grace.

Perhaps the sum of the view taken by Mr Eastlake may be best shown by a quotation:--

"We have now briefly considered the principal æsthetic attributes of the organic and inorganic world. We have traced the influence of two leading principles of beauty--the visible evidence of character in form, and the visible evidence of the higher character of life. We have endeavoured to separate these from other auxiliary sources of agreeable impressions--such as the effect of colours, and the influences derived from the memory of the other senses. Lastly, all these elements have been kept independent of accidental and remote associations, since a reference to such sources of interest could only serve to complicate the question; and render the interpretation of nature less possible.

A third criterion remains; it is applicable to human beings, and to them only. Human beauty is then most complete, when it not only conforms to the archetypal standard of its species, when it not only exhibits in the greatest perfection the attributes of life, but when it most bears the impress of mind, controlling and spiritualising both." "The conclusion which the foregoing considerations appear to warrant, may be now briefly stated as follows:--_Character is relative beauty--Life is the highest character--Mind is the highest life._"

We confess, in conclusion, that we are not yet disposed to admit, from any thing we have read, that Burke's "Sublime and Beautiful" is superseded. We can as readily believe that the sublime and beautiful may be reunited in one view, as that it is optional to separate them. The sublime and the beautiful both belong to us as human beings, making their sensible impressions all sources of pleasure, greatly differing in kind. It is inseparable from our condition to have a sense of a being vastly superior to ourselves: sublimity has a reference to that superior power over us, and to ourselves, as subject to it: while it renders us inferior, it lifts our minds to the knowledge of the greater. Beauty, on the contrary, seems to look up to us for aid, support, or sympathy. It thus flatters while it pleases, and, in contradiction to the subduing influence of the sublime, it makes ourselves in some respects the superior, and puts us in good humour both with the object and ourselves.

We are loath to quit this most interesting subject. We thank Mr Eastlake for bringing it so charmingly before us. We feel that our remarks have been very inadequate, both with regard to the nature of the subject, and as "The Philosophy of the Fine Arts" may seem to demand. But we are aware that to do both justice would require larger space than can be here allowed, and an abler pen than we can command. We almost fear a complete elucidation of beauty is not within the scope of the human mind. It may be to us not from earth, but from above; and we are not prepared to receive its whole truth. Burke somewhere observes that--"The waters must be troubled ere they will give out their virtues." The allusion is admirable, and justifies disturbing discussions. On such a subject, where the root of the matter grows not on earth, it may be added, in further allusion, that the stirring hand should be that of an angel.

INDEX TO VOL. LXIV.

Acting in China, 89.

Agriculture of France and England, comparison of, 3.

Alain family, the, extracts from, 560.

Algoa bay, settlement of, 159.

American thoughts on European revolutions, 31.

American war, caricatures illustrating the, 552.

Anne, queen, character of, 327.

Antwerp, a legend from, 444.

Arabian nights, the, 472.

Aristocracy, necessity of a, to Britain, 14.

Art its prospects, 145 Eastlake's literature of, 753.

Art-unions, results of, 146.

Ashley, lord, on the juvenile population, 66.

Ateliers Nationaux, sketches of the, 249.

Auersperg, count, 382, 532.

Australia, importance of, 66 demand for emigration to, 67 Mitchell's researches in, 68.

Austria, the revolution in, 519.

Baden, state of, 378.

Baikal, the lake, 88.

Balloons, rage for, 554.

Balzac, M. de, 572.

Banking act, suspension of the, 262, 263

Barbauld's hymns, 404.

Barnard's cruise, &c., review of, 158.

Bashkirs, the, 81.

Basil, letter to, 31.

Baston, Robert, 222, 223.

Bavaria, the revolution in, 518.

Beauty, Eastlake's theory of, 762.

Beaver and Beaver-stone, the, 84.

Beggar's Opera, origin of the, 336.

Belgium, state of, 521.

Bentinck, lord George, death of, 632.

Beresov, town of, 80, 81.

Bernard, Andrew, 225, 226.

Blue Dragoon, the, 207.

Blum, Robert, 532.

Bright, John, 271.

British navy, the, 595.

Buraets, the, 90.

Buried flower, the, 108.

Burke's eulogy on Walpole, 331.

Byron's address to the ocean, on, 499.

Cabrera, movement under, 630.

Caged skylark, to a, 290.

Call, a, by Julia Day, 625.

Canning, rupture of Castlereagh with, 620.

Canterbury tales, the, 466.

Cape, sketches of the, 158.

Caricatures of the 18th century, the, 543.

Caroline, queen, 331, 332, 334, _et seq._

Carpentaria, gulf of, expedition to, 68.

Castlereagh, lord, memoirs of, 610.

Catholic priesthood, proposed endowment of the, 638.

Cavaignac, general, 259.

Caxtons, the, Part IV. chap. ix., 40 chap. x., 41 chap. xi., 43 chap. xii., 44 chap. xiii., 48 chap. xiv., 50