CHAPTER LX.

AN OFFERING.

Clementina was always ready to accord any reasonable request Florimel could make of her; but her letter lifted such a weight from her heart and life that she would now have done whatever she desired, reasonable or unreasonable, provided only it was honest. She had no difficulty in accepting Florimel's explanation that her sudden disappearance was but a breaking of the social jail, the flight of the weary bird from its foreign cage back to the country of its nest; and that same morning she called upon Demon. The hound, feared and neglected, was rejoiced to see her, came when she called him, and received her caresses: there was no ground for dreading his company. It was a long journey, but if it had been across a desert instead of through her own country, the hope that lay at the end of it would have made it more than pleasant. She, as well as Lady Bellair, had friends upon the way, but no desire either to lengthen the journey or shorten its tedium by visiting them.

The letter would have found her at Wastbeach instead of London had not the society and instructions of the schoolmaster detained her a willing prisoner to its heat and glare and dust. Him only in all London must she see to bid good-bye. To Camden Town therefore she went that same evening, when his work would be over for the day. As usual now, she was shown into his room--his only one. As usual also, she found him poring over his Greek Testament. The gracious, graceful woman looked lovelily strange in that mean chamber--like an opal in a brass ring. There was no such contrast between the room and its occupant. His bodily presence was too weak to "stick fiery off" from its surroundings, and to the eye that saw through the bodily presence to the inherent grandeur, that grandeur suggested no discrepancy, being of the kind that lifts everything to its own level, casts the mantle of its own radiance around its surroundings. Still, to the eye of love and reverence it was not pleasant to see him in such _entourage_, and now that Clementina was going to leave him, the ministering spirit that dwelt in the woman was troubled.

"Ah!" he said, and rose as she entered, "this is then the angel of my deliverance!" But with such a smile he did not look as if he had much to be delivered from. "You see," he went on, "old man as I am, and peaceful, the summer will lay hold upon me. She stretches out a long arm into this desert of houses and stones, and sets me longing after the green fields and the living air--it seems dead here--and the face of God, as much as one may behold of the Infinite through the revealing veil of earth and sky and sea. Shall I confess my weakness, my poverty of spirit, my covetousness after the visual? I was even getting a little tired of that glorious God-and-man lover, Saul of Tarsus: no, not of him, never of _him_, only of his shadow in his words. Yet perhaps--yes, I think so--it is God alone of whom a man can never get tired. Well, no matter: tired I was, when lo! here comes my pupil, with more of God in her face than all the worlds and their skies He ever made."

"I would my heart were as full of Him too, then, sir," answered Clementina. "But if I am anything of a comfort to you, I am more than glad; therefore the more sorry to tell you that I am going to leave you, though for a little while only, I trust."

"You do not take me by surprise, my lady. I have of course been looking forward for some time to my loss and your gain. The world is full of little deaths--deaths of all sorts and sizes, rather let me say. For this one I was prepared. The good summer-land calls you to its bosom, and you must go."

"Come with me," cried Clementina, her eyes eager with the light of the sudden thought, while her heart reproached her grievously that only now first had it come to her.

"A man must not leave the most irksome work for the most peaceful pleasure," answered the schoolmaster. "I am able to live--yes, and do my work--without you, my lady," he added with a smile, "though I shall miss you sorely."

"But you do not know where I want you to come," she said.

"What difference can that make, my lady, except indeed in the amount of pleasure to be refused, seeing this is not a matter of choice? I must be with the children whom I have engaged to teach, and whose parents pay me for my labor--not with those who, besides, can do well without me."

"I cannot, sir--not for long at least."

"What! not with Malcolm to supply my place?"

Clementina blushed, but only like a white rose. She did not turn her head aside; she did not lower their lids to veil the light she felt mount into her eyes; she looked him gently in the face as before, and her aspect of entreaty did not change. "Ah! do not be unkind, master," she said.

"Unkind!" he repeated. "You know I am not. I have more kindness in my heart than any lips can tell. You do not know, you could not yet imagine, the half of what I hope of and for and from you."

"I _am_ going to see Malcolm," she said with a little sigh. "That is, I am going to visit Lady Lossie at her place in Scotland--your own old home, where so many must love you. _Can't_ you come? I shall be traveling alone, quite alone, except my servants."

A shadow came over the schoolmaster's face: "You do not _think_, my lady, or you would not press me. It pains me that you do not see at once it would be dishonest to go without timely notice to my pupils, and to the public too. But, beyond that quite, I never do anything of myself. I go not where I wish, but where I seem to be called or sent. I never even wish much, except when I pray to Him in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. After what He wants to give me I am wishing all day long. I used to build many castles, not without a beauty of their own--that was when I had less understanding--now I leave them to God to build for me: He does it better, and they last longer. See now, this very hour, when I needed help, could I have contrived a more lovely annihilation of the monotony that threatened to invade my weary spirit than this inroad of light in the person of my Lady Clementina? Nor will He allow me to get overwearied with vain efforts. I do not think He will keep me here long, for I find I cannot do much for these children. They are but some of His many pagans--not yet quite ready to receive Christianity, I think--not like children with some of the old seeds of the truth buried in them, that want to be turned up nearer to the light. This ministration I take to be more for my good than theirs--a little trial of faith and patience for me--a stony corner of the lovely valley of humiliation to cross. True, I _might_ be happier where I could hear the larks, but I do not know that anywhere have I been more peaceful than in this little room, on which I see you so often cast round your eyes curiously, perhaps pitifully, my lady."

"It is not at all a fit place for _you_," said Clementina with a touch of indignation.

"Softly, my lady, lest, without knowing it, your love should make you sin. Who set thee, I pray, for a guardian angel over my welfare? I could scarce have a lovelier, true; but where is thy brevet? No, my lady: it is a greater than thou that sets me the bounds of my habitation. Perhaps He may give me a palace one day. If I might choose, it would be things that belong to a cottage--the whiteness and the greenness and the sweet odors of cleanliness. But the Father has decreed for His children that they shall know the thing that is neither their ideal nor His. Who can imagine how in this respect things looked to our Lord when He came and found so little faith on the earth? But perhaps, my lady, you would not pity my present condition so much if you had seen the cottage in which I was born, and where my father and mother loved each other, and died happier than on their wedding-day. There I was happy too until their loving ambition decreed that I should be a scholar and a clergyman. Not before then did I ever know anything worthy the name of trouble. A little cold and a little hunger at times, and not a little restlessness always, was all. But then--ah, then my troubles began. Yet God, who bringeth light out of darkness, hath brought good even out of my weakness and presumption and half-unconscious falsehood. When do you go?"

"To-morrow morning, as I purpose."

"Then God be with thee! He _is_ with thee, only my prayer is that thou mayst know it. He is with me, and I know it. He does not find this chamber too mean or dingy or unclean to let me know Him near me in it."

"Tell me one thing before I go," said Clementina: "are we not commanded to bear each other's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ? I read it to-day."

"Then why ask me?"

"For another question: does not that involve the command to those who have burdens that they should allow others to bear them?"

"Surely, my lady. But _I_ have no burden to let you bear."

"Why should I have everything and you nothing? Answer me that."

"My lady, I have millions more than you, for I have been gathering the crumbs under my Master's table for thirty years."

"You are a king," answered Clementina. "But a king needs a handmaiden somewhere in his house: that let _me_ be in yours. No, I will be proud, and assert my rights: I am your daughter. If I am not, why am I here? Do you not remember telling me that the adoption of God meant a closer relation than any other fatherhood, even His own first fatherhood, could signify? You cannot cast me off if you would. Why should you be poor when I am rich? You _are_ poor: you cannot deny it," she concluded with a serious playfulness.

"I will not deny my privileges," said the schoolmaster, with a smile such as might have acknowledged the possession of some exquisite and envied rarity.

"I believe," insisted Clementina, "you are just as poor as the apostle Paul when he sat down to make a tent, or as our Lord himself after he gave up carpentering."

"You are wrong there, my lady. I am not so poor as they must often have been."

"But I don't know how long I may be away, and you may fall ill, or--or--see some--some book you want very much, or--"

"I never do," said the schoolmaster.

"What! never see a book you want to have?"

"No, not now. I have my Greek Testament, my Plato and my Shakespeare, and one or two little books besides whose wisdom I have not yet quite exhausted."

"I can't bear it!" cried Clementina, almost on the point of weeping. "You will not let me near you. You put out an arm as long as the summer's, and push me away from you. _Let_ me be your servant." As she spoke she rose, and walking softly up to him where he sat, kneeled at his knees and held out suppliantly a little bag of white silk tied with crimson. "Take it--father," she said, hesitating, and bringing the word out with an effort: "take your daughter's offering--a poor thing to show her love, but something to ease her heart."

He took it, and weighed it up and down in his hand with an amused smile, but his eyes full of tears. It was heavy. He opened it. A chair was within his reach: he emptied it on the seat of it, and laughed with merry delight as its contents came tumbling out. "I never saw so much gold in my life if it were all taken together," he said. "What beautiful stuff it is! But I don't want it, my dear. It would but trouble me." And as he spoke he began to put it in the bag again. "You will want it for your journey," he said.

"I have plenty in my reticule," she answered. "That is a mere nothing to what I could have to-morrow morning for writing a cheque. I am afraid I am very rich. It is such a shame! But I can't well help it. You must teach me how to become poor. Tell me true: how much money have you?" She said this with such an earnest look of simple love that the schoolmaster made haste to rise that he might conceal his growing emotion.

"Rise, my dear lady," he said as he rose himself, "and I will show you." He gave her his hand, and she obeyed, but troubled and disappointed, and so stood looking after him while he went to a drawer. Thence, searching in a corner of it, he brought a half-sovereign, a few shillings and some coppers, and held them out to her on his hand with the smile of one who has proved his point. "There!" he said, "do you think Paul would have stopped preaching to make a tent so long as he had as much as that in his pocket? I shall have more on Saturday, and I always carry a month's rent in my good old watch, for which I never had much use, and now have less than ever."

Clementina had been struggling with herself: now she burst into tears.

"Why, what a misspending of precious sorrow!" exclaimed the schoolmaster. "Do you think because a man has not a gold-mine he must die of hunger? I once heard of a sparrow that never had a worm left for the morrow, and died a happy death notwithstanding." As he spoke he took her handkerchief from her hand and dried her tears with it. But he had enough ado to keep his own back. "Because I won't take a bagful of gold from you when I don't want it," he went on, "do you think I should let myself starve without coming to you? I promise you I will let you know--come to you if I can--the moment I get too hungry to do my work well and have no money left. Should I think it a disgrace to take money from _you_? That would show a poverty of spirit such as I hope never to fall into. My _sole_ reason for refusing now is that I do not need it."

But for all his loving words and assurances Clementina could not stay her tears. She was not ready to weep, but now her eyes were as a fountain.

"See, then, for your tears are hard to bear, my daughter," he said, "I will take one of these golden ministers, and if it has flown from me ere you come, seeing that, like the raven, it will not return if once I let it go, I will ask you for another. It _may_ be God's will that you should feed me for a time."

"Like one of Elijah's ravens," said Clementina, with an attempted laugh that was really a sob.

"Like a dove whose wings are covered with silver and her feathers with yellow gold," said the schoolmaster.

A moment of silence followed, broken only by Clementina's failures in quieting herself.

"To me," he resumed, "the sweetest fountain of money is the hand of love, but a man has no right to take it from that fountain except he is in want of it. I am not. True, I go somewhat bare, my lady; but what is that when my Lord would have it so?"

He opened again the bag, and slowly, reverentially indeed, drew from it one of the new sovereigns with which it was filled. He put it in a waistcoat pocket and laid the bag on the table.

"But your clothes are shabby, sir," said Clementina, looking at him with a sad little shake of the head.

"Are they?" he returned, and looked down at his lower garments, reddening and anxious. "I did not think they were more than a little rubbed, but they shine somewhat," he said. "They are indeed polished by use," he went on with a troubled little laugh: "but they have no holes yet--at least none that are visible," he corrected. "If you tell me, my lady, if you honestly tell me, that my garments"--and he looked at the sleeve of his coat, drawing back his head from it to see it better--"are unsightly, I will take of your money and buy me a new suit." Over his coat-sleeve he regarded her, questioning.

"Everything about you is beautiful," she burst out. "You want nothing but a body that lets the light through." She took the hand still raised in his survey of his sleeve, pressed it to her lips, and walked, with even more than her wonted state, slowly from the room.

He took the bag of gold from the table and followed her down the stair. Her chariot was waiting her at the door. He handed her in, and laid the bag on the little seat in front.

"Will you tell him to drive home?" she said with a firm voice, and a smile which if any one care to understand let him read Spenser's fortieth sonnet. And so they parted. The coachman took the queer, shabby, un-London-like man for a fortune-teller his lady was in the habit of consulting, and paid homage to his power with the handle of his whip as he drove away. The schoolmaster returned to his room--not to his Plato, not even to Saul of Tarsus, but to the Lord himself.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

SOME LAST WORDS FROM SAINTE-BEUVE.

It is seven years since the world of letters lost the prince of critics, the last of the critics. His unfinished and unpublished manuscripts were eagerly demanded and devoured; while obituaries, notices, reminiscences and those analyses which the French term _appréciations_ rained in from various quarters. The latest of these that deserves attention was an outline of Saint-Beuve's life and literary career by the Vicomte d'Haussonville, in which, with an affectation of impartiality and fairness, every page was streaked with malice; imperfect justice was done to Sainte-Beuve's intellect; his influence and reputation were understated; and a picture was given of him as a man which could not but be disagreeable and disappointing to the vast number who admired him as a writer. In regard to the first two points, ill-nature and inaccuracy can do no harm: Sainte-Beuve's fame and ability are perfectly well known to the reading public of to-day, and the opinion of posterity will rest upon his own merits rather than on the statements of any biographer, as he is one of the authors whose writings are sure to be more read than what other people write about them. The unpleasant personal impression is not so easily dismissed: however exaggerated we may be disposed to think it, the reflection occurs, "How this man was feared!" The appearance of the notice several years after Sainte-Beuve's death strengthens this conviction: M. d'Haussonville waited until his subject should be quite cold before he ventured to touch him.

The causes of this dread and dislike are not to be found in Sainte-Beuve's voluminous works, nor have I met with any evidence of it in the writings of his literary contemporaries. He obviously held that it is a critic's duty to be just before he is generous, and there may be a lack of geniality in his praise, though it is not given grudgingly; but I cannot recall an instance of literary spite in the large proportion of his writings with which I am familiar. His judgments are often severe, never harsh: he frequently dealt in satire, rarely, as far as my memory serves, in sarcasm, and he condemns irony as one of the least intelligent dispositions of the mind. The only case in which I remember having suspected Sainte-Beuve of ill-nature was in a notice of J. J. Ampère printed in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ shortly after the latter's death; but a person who had known Ampère long and well, and on the friendliest terms, declared that it gave an entirely fair description of the man, who, full of talent and amiability as he was, had many weaknesses. Two pleas only can justify disinterring and gibbeting an author's private life--either his having done the same by others, or his having made the public the confidant of his individual experience. Few writers have intruded their own personality upon their readers less than Sainte-Beuve has done: the poems and novels of his youth, which won fervent admiration from the literary leaders of that day, De Vigny, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, are now forgotten: he is known to readers of the last half century by a series of critical and biographical essays extending from 1823 or 1824 to 1870, which combine every attribute of perfect criticism except enthusiasm. The most prominent feature of his method is the conscientiousness with which he credits the person upon whom he passes judgment with every particle of worth which can be extracted from his writings, acts or sayings: he adopts as the basis of criticism the acknowledgment of whatever merit may exist in the subject of consideration; and his talent and patience for sifting the grain from the chaff are remarkable and admirable. An author who has left some forty volumes conceived in this spirit should have been safe against an effusion of spleen in his biographer. I am not assailing the fidelity of M. d'Haussonville's portrait--of which I have no means of judging--but the temper in which it is executed, which can be judged without difficulty. Besides the injustice already mentioned, it is disfigured by tittle-tattle, which tends to render the original ridiculous and repulsive, but does not add one whit to our knowledge of Sainte-Beuve as a man or an author.

A defence of Sainte-Beuve is not within the purpose of the present article; but it was impossible for one who has known him favorably for twenty years through his works and the testimony of his most distinguished literary compeers to speak of him at all without protesting against the detraction to which his memory has been subjected. Two small posthumous volumes have lately been issued in France,[C] revealing qualities which might expose the dead man to a mean revenge, though to most readers they will have a delightful freshness unspoiled by any bitter flavor. They consist of a series of notes on all sorts of subjects, literary, dramatic, religious and political, one of them being actually made up of the jottings in his later notebooks, while the other contains the memoranda of a sort of high-class gossip with which Sainte-Beuve supplied a friend, the editor of _La Revue Suisse_, during the years 1843-45. These were not to be published as they stood, but to be used by the editor, M. Juste Olivier, as he should think best: they are fragmentary, mere bits of raw material--if any product of that accomplished brain can be so termed--to be worked up by another hand. They were qualified by marginal observations, such as "This is for you alone," "This is rather strong," and they were to be absolutely anonymous, the author allowing himself the luxury of free speech, of writing exactly as he thought and felt; in short, of trusting his indiscretion to M. Olivier's discretion. The latter used his judgment independently; Sainte-Beuve's views and comments often became merely one ingredient in an article for which others supplied the rest; and the editor kneaded the whole into shape to his own liking. But the MSS. remained intact, and were confided by M. Olivier to M. Jules Troubat, Sainte-Beuve's private secretary and editor, who has published them in their integrity, he tells us, with the exception of "a few indispensable suppressions." The other volume, as we have said, is composed of his notebooks. These last were intended to take the place of memoirs by Sainte-Beuve himself, who wrote a short preface, under the name of M. Troubat, destined for a larger volume to appear after his death. He published, however, the greater part of those which he had already collected in vol. ii. of the _Causeries de Lundi_: the present series contains the notes which accumulated subsequently. M. Troubat has given them to the world as they stood. Both books abound in the characteristics of the author's style--good sense, moderation, perception, discrimination, delicacy, sparkle, unerring taste, as well as judgment in matters of intelligence. A parcel of disconnected passages cannot possess the flow and finish of a complete essay, but each bit has the clearness, incisiveness and smooth polish of his native wit. They give us Sainte-Beuve's first impression, thought, mental impulse, about daily events regarding which he sometimes afterward modified his opinion. Not often, however, for he had, if not precisely the prophetic vision which belongs to genius or minds illuminated by enthusiasm or sympathy, that keen far-sightedness which recognizes at a distance rather than foresees the coming event or man. He tells a quantity of anecdotes, and he had exactly the sort of humor and absence of tenderness for human weakness which perceives the point that makes a story good in the greatest variety of speeches and situations. The key to the dislike and fear with which some people must have regarded him while living lies probably in just this appreciation. It is vain to assert that humor is necessarily kindly, or the adjectives "grim" and "savage" would not so often be tacked to it. Nobody could have hoped that friendship would blind Sainte-Beuve to an absurdity: on the other hand, even his enemies might count on his recognition if they had said a good thing, and his not spoiling it in the repetition, as too many friends do. This produced an impartiality in his verdicts which is the moral essence of criticism, but perhaps the most trying quality to the subject of it: he says himself that he had irritated and envenomed more people by his praise than by his blame. He had not a high opinion of human nature, which is curiously illustrated by his female portraits: when there has been only a doubt of a woman's virtue, he never gives her the benefit of the doubt; when there has not been even the suspicion of a slip, he presumes that she kept her secrets better than most people do. He was sensitive to the accusation of cynicism, and resented extremely an article in _L'Union_ of June, 1855, in which he was set down as having not only a skeptical mind, but a skeptical heart; which was no doubt very nearly true. Yet he was on his guard against his natural cynicism in his literary judgments at least, as one need but glance over them to see. In the _Cahiers_ he cites an expression of his fair friend Madame d'Arbonville: "How many good things there are besides the things which we like! We ought to make room within ourselves for a certain _opposite_;" and he adds that this should be the motto of a liberal and intelligent critic. These convictions helped to make his criticism as admirable, as invaluable, as it is; but the sharpness from which his literary work is free makes his private observations on men and things more entertaining. There are few people so well-natured as not to enjoy the peculiar pungency which gives many of the passages in the two volumes before us their relish: now and then it is as if we had got hold of the cruets which were to season a whole article. There is a batch of anecdotes about Lamartine, whose conspicuous gifts and position put his puerile vanity in relief; and that vanity Sainte-Beuve never spared. Lamartine set the fashion of his own idolatry by constituting himself the high priest; adulation was not enough--he demanded adoration; and he received it. He had a habit of contemplating himself from an objective but highly-idealizing point of view, best expressed by saying that he had a hero-worship for himself: his memoirs and other autobiographical writings are full of it, and in his intercourse it perpetually overflowed. "That is the brow they have tried to bend to the dust!" he exclaimed, standing before his own likeness in Ary Scheffer's studio. Lord Houghton, among his many good stories, had one of spending an evening at Lamartine's in Paris with a circle of celebrities. Alfred de Vigny, who had been out of town, presented himself. "Welcome back!" said Lamartine magnificently. "You come from the provinces: do they admire us down there?"--"They adore you," replied De Vigny with a bow. The conversation was a prolonged paean to the host, with choral strophe and antistrophe. One of the party began to rehearse the aspects in which Lamartine was the greatest man in France--"As a poet, as an orator, as an historian, as a statesman;" and as he paused, "And as a _soldier_," added Lamartine with a sublime gesture, "if ever France shall need him." This may have been the country neighbor who, we learn from Sainte-Beuve, pronounced Lamartine to be Fénelon without his didacticism, Rousseau without his sophistry, Mirabeau without his incendiary notions. Still, there were asides in the dialogue. One evening, the week before the overthrow of the provisional government of which Lamartine was president, he had a crowded reception, and, notwithstanding the failure and imminent downfall of his administration, he was radiant with satisfaction. "What can M. de Lamartine have to be so pleased about?" said one of his friends to another. "He is pleased with himself," was the reply.--"One of those speeches," observes Sainte-Beuve, "which only friends find to make." But Lamartine was by no means solitary in this infatuation. Sainte-Beuve remarks that "Nothing is so common in our days: some think themselves God, some the Son of God, some archangels. Pierre Leroux thinks himself the first, De Vigny the last: Lamartine is a good prince--he is satisfied to be a seraph."

These books give us daily glimpses of Paris thirty years ago, of that incessant mental movement, inquiry, desire for novelty and vivacity of transient interest which dazzle the brain as the scintillation of the sun upon the unstable waves does the eye. In all great cities, quite as much as in villages, there is a topic which for the moment occupies everybody, and which cannot be escaped, whether you enter a drawing-room, pick up a newspaper or rush into the street: the chief difference is, that in the great cities it changes oftener--"every fortnight here," says Sainte-Beuve of Paris. The history of many a nine days' wonder may be gathered from the _Chroniques_: we can mark the first effect of occurrences startling at the time, some of which are now wholly forgotten, while others have become historical; we witness the appearance of new divinities who have since found their pedestals, niches or obscure corners. Among these was Ponsard, chiefly known in this country, to those who remember Mademoiselle Rachel's brief, gleaming transit, as the author of _Horace et Lydie_, a light, bright, graceful piece based upon Horace's "Donec gratus eram tibi."

M. Ponsard, who was from the south of France, arrived in Paris in 1843 with a tragedy called _Lucrèce_, which had been in his pocket for three years. It was read first at the house of the actor Bocage before a party of artists, actors and men of letters such as Paris alone can bring together. The littérateurs gave their opinion with caution and an oracular ambiguity which did not commit them too much: Gautier, on being asked how he liked it, replied, "It did not put me to sleep;" but the sculptor Préault, not having a literary reputation at stake, declared that if there were a "Roman prize" for tragedy (as there is for music and the fine arts, entitling the fortunate competitor to four years' travel and study in classic lands at the expense of the government) the author would set out on the morrow for the Eternal City. The play was read again a week or two afterward in the drawing-room of the Comtesse d'Agoult, the beautiful, gifted, reckless friend of Lizst's youth, and mother of the wife of Von Bulow and Wagner. The success was complete. Sainte-Beuve was again present; and Lamartine was among the audience full of admiration: the poor young poet could not nerve himself to come. The play was read by Bocage, who took the principal part, that of Brutus, when it was brought out at the Odéon. The chaste Lucretia was played by Madame Dorval, whose strength lay in parts of a different kind, and who announced her new character to a friend with the comment, "I only play women of virtue now-a-days." Reports of the new tragedy, which had been heard only in secret session, soon got about Paris, and excited intense curiosity and impatience; one of the daily papers published a scene from _Lucrèce_; the sale was immense; everybody praised it to the skies, even members of the Academy. The next day the hoax came out: a clever but third-rate writer, M. Méry, had made April fools of the wits of Paris. The piece itself was soon performed, and made what is called in this country an immense sensation: the theatre, long out of favor, was crowded every night; the papers were full of it every morning; it was the topic about which everybody talked. Authors who had lately written less popular plays were somewhat envious and spiteful; Victor Hugo pronounced _Lucrèce_ to be Livy versified; Dumas repeated (or invented) the speech of an enthusiastic notary, who exclaimed, "What a piece! Not one of my clerks could have written it." Madame de Girardin had just brought out her tragedy of _Judith_ at the Théâtre Français, with the powerful support of Rachel in the principal character: the drama, when read by Rachel and Madame de Girardin (whose beauty, wit and social position gave her during her whole life a fictitious rank in a certain set, of which none were better aware than the members of it) in Madame Récamier's drawing-room, had produced a better effect than it did upon the stage, where it was considered a respectable failure. Madame de Girardin could not control or conceal her chagrin, and meeting M. Ponsard one evening at the Duchesse de Grammont's, declined to have him presented to her. He took his honors so quietly--so tamely in the opinion of some people--that Madame Dorval exhorted him: "Wake up! wake up! you look like a hen that has hatched an eagle's egg." Since the Augustan age of French literature, since Corneille and Racine, a really fine tragedy on a classic subject had been unknown, and the romantic reaction was then at its height. The moral view of _Lucrèce_ was a new and important element of success. "The religious feeling of the Roman matron, the inviolability of the domestic hearth, are these not new? do not they count for much?" observed the virtuous philosopher Ballanche, the devoted, unselfish friend of Madame Récamier. Sainte-Beuve was greatly impressed by the nobility of the characters and treatment, and after pointing out its beauties and shortcomings, set the seal to his encomium by affirming that the secret of the power of _Lucrèce_ was that it had soul.

The extraordinary favor with which this play was received marked an epoch in a small way, a return to antique ideas and themes, to more elevated subjects and modes of dealing with them. Six weeks after its appearance Sainte-Beuve writes: "We have always been rather apish in France: the Grecian, Roman and biblical tragedies which every day now brings forth are innumerable. Who will deliver me from these Greeks and Romans? Here we are overrun by them again after forty years' insurrection, and by the Hebrews to boot." The high-water mark of the author's popularity was the publication of a trifle called the _Anti-Lucrèce_, which was sold in the purlieus of the Odéon: next day there was a rumor that a second _Anti-Lucrèce_ was in preparation. But the tide had turned: six months later, when the theatre reopened after the summer vacation with the same tragedy, Sainte-Beuve records: "_Lucrèce_ has reappeared only to die, not by the poignard, but of languor, coldness, premature old age. It is frightful how little and how fast we live in these times--works as well as men. We survive ourselves and our children: the generations are turned upside down. Here is a piece which scarcely six months ago all Paris ran to hear without being asked:... now they are tired of it already, and can find nothing in it: it is like last year's snow." The death-blow of the tragedy was given, Sainte-Beuve says, not by the dagger, but by a luckless blunder of the actor who played Lucretia's father, and who, instead of saying, _L'assassin pâlissant_ ("The assassin turning pale,") said, _L'assassin polisson_ ("The scamp of an assassin"); which set everybody laughing; and that was the end of it.

M. Ponsard might console himself, if he liked, by the reflection that his play, if not immortal, had killed his fair rival's _Judith_ and swallowed up Victor Hugo's _Burgraves_, which had been acted at the Théâtre Français a month before _Lucrèce_ was first produced. Regarding the former, Sainte-Beuve shows unwonted tenderness or policy. "Never let me be too epigrammatic about Madame de Girardin," he wrote to M. Olivier: "I would not seem to play the traitor to her smiles;" though in reference to a sharp encounter between her and Jules Janin he hints that she has claws of her own. He does not deny himself the pleasure of mentioning Victor Hugo's little weaknesses. At the first three representations of _Les Burgraves_ the theatre was packed with the author's friends: on the fourth a less partial public hissed to that degree that the curtain was dropped, and thenceforward each night was stormier until the play was withdrawn. Hugo could not bring himself to allow that he had been hissed, and, being behind the scenes, said to the actors, with the fatal sibilation whistling through the house, "They are interrupting my play" (_On trouble ma pièce_); which became a byword with these wicked wits. Sainte-Beuve, with his infallible instinct of wherein dwelt the vital greatness or defect of a production, characterizes the piece as an exaggeration. He admits that it has talent, especially in the preface, but adds, "Hugo sees all things larger than life: they look black to him--in _Ruy Blas_ they looked red. But there is grandeur in the _Burgraves_: he alone, or Chateaubriand, could have written the introduction.... The banks of the Rhine are not so lofty and thunder-riven as he makes out, nor is Thessaly so black, nor Notre Dame so enormous, but more elegant, as may be seen from the pavement. But this is the defect of his eye."

Amidst these theatrical diversions the chronicler alludes to the fashionable preaching which occupied the gay world at hours when playhouses and drawing-rooms were not open. There was a religious revival going on in Paris almost equal to that which Moody and Sankey have produced here. "During Passion Week" (1843) "the crowd in all the churches, but at Notre Dame particularly, was prodigious. M. de Ravignan preached three times a day--at one o'clock for the women of the gay world, in the evening for the men, at other hours for the workingmen. He adapted his sermons to the different classes: to the women of the world he spoke as a man who knows the world and has belonged to it. They rushed, they crowded, they wept. I do not know how many communicants there were at Easter, but I believe the figure has not been so high for fifty years." At Advent of the same year the same scenes were repeated, with the Abbé Lacordaire in the pulpit. This excitement, and the debates in the Chamber on the subject of the theological lectures at the Sorbonne and College of France, call forth some excellent pages regarding the condition of Catholicism in France and the Gallican Church, and a brief, rapid review of the causes of the decline of the latter, which Sainte-Beuve asserts (more than thirty years ago) to be defunct. "Gallicanism, the noblest child of Catholicism, is dead before his father, _who in his dotage remains obstinately faithful to his principles_.... Gallicanism in its dissolution left a vast patrimony: the Jesuits may grab a huge bit of it, but the bulk will be diminished and disseminated.... At the rate things are going, Catholicism is tending to become _a sect_." The insight of this is as remarkable as the expression. Some years afterward, marking the progress of liberal ideas in religion, he says: "Men's conceptions of God are constantly changing. What was the atheism of yesterday will be the deism of to-morrow."

There are few Frenchman of any calling who are indifferent to politics, and the men of letters almost without exception are interested spectators when not actors in public affairs. From 1843 to 1845, the period of the _Chroniques_, was a dead calm in the political horizon of France, undisturbed by the little distant cloud of warfare in Algiers: the Legitimists worked up farcical fermentations which had no more body or head than those of the present day, although the chances of the party were rather better. The duke of Bordeaux (as the Comte de Chambord was then called) made an excursion to England one Christmas, which was seized as an occasion, or more probably was a preconcerted signal, for a dreary little demonstration of loyalty on the part of his adherents, who crossed over to pay their respects to him in London: by great arithmetical efforts their number was added up and made to amount to four hundred, though whether so many really went was doubted. There were a few old noblemen of great family: Berryer the eminent lawyer and Chateaubriand were the only names of individual distinction in the list, and the chief results were that Queen Victoria was annoyed (some of the Orleans family being on a visit to her at the time) and intimated her annoyance, and that the superb Chateaubriand was spoken of in the English newspapers as "the good old man;" which Sainte-Beuve enjoyed extremely.

The _Cahiers_ extend from 1847 to 1869, including the vicissitudes which brought about the Second Empire, whose annihilation Sainte-Beuve died half a year too soon to witness. In January, 1848, he felt the storm brewing in the air, though he little guessed from what quarter it would come nor on whose head it would burst. On the revolution of the 24th of February he writes: "What events! what a dream! I was prepared for much, but not so soon, nor for this.... I am tempted to believe in the nullity of every judgment, my own in particular--I who make it a business to judge others, and am so short-sighted.... The future will disclose what no one can foresee. There is no use in talking of ordinary wisdom and prudence: they have been utterly at fault. Guizot, the historian-philosopher, has turned out more stupid than a Polignac: Utopia and the poet's dream, on the contrary, have become facts and reality. I forgive Lamartine everything: he has been great during these days, and done honor to the poetic nature." But afterward, in looking back to the poet's reign, he grew satirical: "It was in the time of the good provisional government, which did so many things and left so many undone. The fortunes of France crumbled to pieces in a fortnight, but it was under the invocation of equality and fraternity. As to liberty, it only existed for madmen, and the wise took good care to make no use of it. 'The great folk are terribly scared,' said my portress, but the small fry triumphed: it was their turn. So much had never been said about work before, and so little was never done. People walked about all day, planted liberty-trees at every street-corner, illuminated willy-nilly, and perorated in the clubs and squares until midnight. The Exchange rang with disasters in the morning: in the evening it sparkled with lanterns and fireworks. It was the gayest anarchy for the lower classes of Paris, who had no police and looked after themselves. The street-boys ran about with flags; workmen without work, but paid nevertheless, walked in perpetual procession; the demireps had kicked over the traces, and on the sidewalks the most virtuous fellow-citizenesses were hugged without ceremony: it must be added that they did not resent it too much. The grisettes, having nothing to eat, gave themselves away for nothing or next to nothing, as during the Fronde. The chorus of the Girondists was sung on every open lot, and there was a feast of addresses. Lamartine wrought marvels such as Ulysses might have done, and he was the siren of the hour. Yet they laughed and joked, and the true French wit revived. There was general good-humor and amiability in those first days of a most licentious spring sunshine. There was an admixture of bad taste, as there always is in the people of Paris when they grow sentimental. They made grotesque little gardens round the liberty-trees, which they watered assiduously.... The small fry adored their provisional government, as they formerly did their good king Louis XII., and more than one simple person said with emotion, 'It must be admitted that we are well governed, _they talk so well!_'" Before three months had elapsed the provisional government was at an end: "their feet slipped in blood--literally, in torrents of blood." "The politicians of late years have been playing a game of chess, intent wholly upon the board, but never giving a thought to the table under the board. But the table was alive, the back of a people which began to move, and in the twinkling of an eye chessboard and men went to the devil."

Among the entries of the next ten or twelve years are sketches of the leading statesmen and scraps of their conversation: those of Thiers are very animated. Sainte-Beuve says that he has a happiness of verbal expression which eludes his pen; "yet raise him upon a pinnacle of works of art" (of which M. Thiers has always been a patron publicly and privately), "of historical monuments and flatterers, and he will never be aught but the cleverest of marmosets." If he had lived another twelvemonth, Sainte-Beuve might have had some other word for the Great Citizen. On Guizot he is still more severe, making him out a mere humbug, and of the poorest sort. When the poet Auguste Barbier became a candidate for the French Academy, M. Guizot had never heard of him, and had to be told all about him and his verses--there was surely no disgrace in this ignorance on the part of a man engrossed in studies and pursuits of a more serious nature--but before a week was over he was heard expressing amazement that another person knew nothing of Barbier, and talking of his poems as if he had always been familiar with them. The Duchesse de Broglie said: "What M. Guizot has known since morning he pretends to have known from all eternity."

This paper might be prolonged almost to the length of the volumes themselves by quoting all the keen, sagacious or brilliant sayings which they contain. Two more, merely to exemplify Sainte-Beuve's command of words in very different lines of thought: "The old fragments of cases in [Greek: phi] and [Greek: then], the ancient remains of verbs in [Greek: mi] the second aorists, which alone survive the other submerged tenses, always produce the same effect upon me, in view of the regular declensions and conjugations, as the multitude of the isles and Cyclades in relation to the Peloponnesus and the rest of the mainland on the map of Greece: there was a time when they were all one. The rocks and peaks still stand to attest it."--"_Never_ is a word which has always brought bad luck to him who used it from the tribune."

M. Troubat speaks of the correspondence of Sainte-Beuve as destined for publication: the _Chroniques_ and _Cahiers_ are like anchovies to whet the appetite for a longer and more continuous reading.

SARAH B. WISTER.

FOOTNOTES:

[C] _Chroniques Parisiennes_ and _Les Cahiers de Sainte-Beuve_.

A FEW LETTERS.

BROOKSIDE, April 12, 1872.

Dear Cousin Bessie: It does not seem possible that but two months from to-day I saw you standing on your porch in good old Applethorpe bidding me an April "farewell." I can see you now, as I saw you then, smiling--or rather laughing--and saying, "Write! write often; and if you can't find any _real_ news, make something up." I little thought then I should so soon find material for correspondence. He was very sick at first, but really seems better now. But I forgot you don't know anything about him. Well! neither do _I_ much, but "what I have I give unto thee." So, I'll begin at the beginning of my romance.

Day before yesterday, as I was engaged in the very romantic work of ploughing, I heard a clattering of hoofs and the snort and pant of a horse at full tear. In an instant the runaway was brought up, bang! against my fence. It was the work of but a moment to leap over and seize the animal. I then perceived his rider clinging, senseless, to the saddle by one stirrup. It is a great mercy to him that he was not killed, but he had been dragged but a short distance, and was therefore not severely injured. I secured the horse to the fence as quickly as possible, and then disengaged the gentleman. Upon removing him to the house, sending for a physician and applying various remedies, his consciousness was restored, and we soon discovered his injuries as well as a little of his history. His wounds prove to be bruises about the head and face (more disfiguring than serious), and a broken leg which it will take several weeks to cure.

So here he is on my hands till he is well. I'm not sorry, either, for "it is not good for man to be alone," and I find him my nearest neighbor--like me an orphan, like me with a small fortune, consisting principally of his farm, and about my age. I've no doubt we shall get along capitally. I shall write every few days of his progress, knowing that you will be interested in whatever interests me. Don't forget to send me all the gossip of Applethorpe, for I am going to make my neighbor acquainted with all the inhabitants of Applethorpe by proxy--_i. e._, through your letters; so write your most entertaining ones, as I expect to read them all aloud to amuse and interest a captious invalid. "No more at present" from your affectionate cousin,

PHILIP AUBREY.

TO MISS BESSIE LINTON, Applethorpe.

APPLETHORPE, April 20, 1872.

MY DEAR BOY: Your letter duly rec'd. I am glad you have found companionship, though I am sorry for him that it should be an accident that literally "threw" him in your way. You did not tell me his name, or anything but the bare fact of his accident. Be sure that you will find in me an interested listener--or rather _reader_--of anything you may choose to tell me. But don't leave accounts of _yourself_ out of your letters in order to make room for _him_. Remember, you are my only relation, the only person in the world in whom I have a right to be interested. It does not seem possible to me, when I think of it, that there is only five years' difference in our ages: why, I'm sure I feel ten years older, instead of five. I was very young at fifteen to take charge of a great boy of ten; and if it were not that you were the good boy you always were, I never could have fulfilled the charge your dying mother left me. Do not think, dear, I was not _glad_ to do it for her. Could I ever, _ever_, if I worked five times as hard as I have since she left you, repay all that she did for me, the poor miserable, shy orphan left to her care?

But out upon these memories! Let us deal with the present and future.

_Item._ Mary Montrose's engagement to Joel Roberts is "out" to-day. I'm glad, for I'm tired of keeping the secret. Poor dear Mary! I do _hope_ she will be happy. She inquires very cordially after you every time she sees me. She doesn't know she blasted one of my most precious hopes when she told me she was engaged to Joel.

Good-bye, dear! Be sure and write long letters to your affectionate cousin,

BESSIE L----.

BROOKSIDE, April 30, 1872.

DEAR BESS: Please excuse my not answering your last two letters, on the plea of business. Indeed, working and waiting on my friend, George Hammond, have occupied all my time.

Now, Bessie, I want you to do something for me. Yesterday, when I got your letter, I read it aloud as usual, George looking very sad the while. When I was done he said in a trembling tone, "I wish to heaven there was some one in the world nearly enough related to me to care to write to me! But I am alone, entirely alone;" and his eyes filled. (Forgive his weakness, Bess: he has been very sick.) I tried to cheer him, but all to no purpose till an idea struck him. His face brightening, he said, "Do you believe, Philip--I know it is a great deal to ask--but do you believe you could persuade your cousin to write to _me_? I should prize it _so_ much. Do you think she _would_? Just fancy what it is never to receive a letter from any one except a business-man!"

Now, Bessie, _won't_ you write him once in a while? There is not a particle of harm in it, and I assure you it will be a real boon to the poor fellow. Just imagine him lying here on his back day after day, and not a thing to amuse him but my company!

Of course you'll say that you can have nothing to write about to a stranger. But you'll soon find something, _I_ know: I'll trust to your "woman's wit." Ask him about his past life: begin _that_ way. But there! I'll not give you any advice on the subject: you understand writing letters better than I do. So good-bye, "fair coz." Pray accede to my request.

Yours, etc., PHILIP A----.

BROOKSIDE, July 1, 1872.

MY DEAREST BESSIE: I'm getting jealous! Twice within a week have you written to George Hammond, and but once to me. Your letters to him are long, I know, for I see him read them. The correspondence is become something desperate--no wonder. He has just told me that through your letters he has become very deeply attached to you, and that when I return home at the end of another week he will come and plead his cause personally. He asks my benediction. I am sure he has my most hearty good wishes, and I do hope, Bessie dear, you may be inclined to say "Yes." Then, after you are married, you can come out here and settle down near your only remaining relative for the rest of your natural existence. You smile and shake your head, and say, "Oh yes, that will last till Philip marries!" But I say that if I see you and George Hammond united, it is all I ask.

But I shall say no more. He can plead better by word of mouth than I by paper, I hope. Ever your devoted

PHILIP.

TO MISS BESSIE LINTON.

A week later, Bessie Linton, fair and young spite of her thirty years, waited at the Applethorpe station in her pony-carriage for her cousin and his friend. She was possessed by so many emotions that she hardly knew whether she most wished or most dreaded seeing the visitors. That she was herself deeply interested in George Hammond she did not pretend to deny even to herself; yet just at the last she dreaded seeing him. It seemed to bring everything so near.

The whistle sounded round the bend, and in another moment the dreaded, hoped-for train arrived. There alighted from it a number of passengers, but none that Bessie recognized at all. Presently there came toward her a gentleman with full beard and moustache, holding out his hand and exclaiming, "Cousin Bessie, don't you know me?"

"Why, Philip Aubrey! No, I _didn't_. Why, where--" and she hesitated a half second--"where is my Philip gone?"

"He's here alive and hearty, and the same old scapegrace, I'm afraid."

Then, seeing the look of inquiry and suspense on her face, he added with considerable embarrassment, "George didn't come just yet. I'll tell you all about it when we get home."

She was forced to be satisfied, but a nameless feeling of "something" made the drive a rather silent one, although each tried spasmodically to start a conversation. Tea over, Philip drew Bessie out into the garden, and sitting down in a rustic scat, said, "Bessie, come and sit down: I want to talk to you." Simply, straightforwardly as of old, she came.

"Bessie dear," said Philip, "I have something to say, and don't know how to say it. But I guess the only way is to tell the truth at once. There is no such person as George Hammond."

Bessie's heart-blood stopped for what seemed half an hour, and then she articulated slowly, "Then who wrote those letters, Philip?"

"_I_ did," he answered sadly.

She started away from him as if he had been a serpent. She walked up and down like a caged animal. At last her scorn burst forth: "_You_, Philip Aubrey! _you_! You have dared to laugh me to scorn, have you? You have dared to presume that because I am what the world calls an 'old maid,' I am a fit mark for the arrows of the would-be wits? Philip Aubrey, all I have to wish is, that your actions may recoil upon yourself." She would have said more, but her feelings overcame her entirely, and sitting down she covered her face with her hand, the tears trickling through her fingers.

"Oh, Bessie! Bessie! they have. Bitterly have I repented of my ruse. But I know if you will hear me you will not judge me harshly."

She drew herself up, and throwing all possible scorn into her face, said, "Go! and if there remains in your body one vestige of feeling belonging to a gentleman, never let me look upon your face again."

Like a stricken cur he went from her presence. He knew her too well: he knew that once roused as she now was, years could not efface her impression. He knew she would listen to no apology, no word of any kind; so the only thing left for him to do, as she had expressed it, was to "leave her presence."

As soon as he was fairly gone Bessie rose, went into the house, locked herself in her own room and struggled with herself. She did not even pretend to herself that her trouble was not hard to bear. What did life hold for her now? She had not even the cousin on whom her affections had so long been centred as her one living relation.

"Oh, if he had only died! if he had only died before he deceived me this way!" she moaned, "I think I should have borne it more easily. It cannot be called the thoughtless trick of a boy: he is too old, and has carried it on too long, and planned it all too systematically, for that."

Three hours after she came from her vigil pale and silent, but a conqueror. A little card stuck in the drawing-room mirror told her that Philip had started for New York on his way to his Western home again.

"I declare, Ophelie, Bessie Linton's awful queer about Philip Aubrey. Last night I says to her, says I, 'Bessie, I hear Philip Aubrey's home--is he?' First she turned mighty red, and then as white as a sheet, and she seemed kind a-chokin' like; but in a moment she says, 'So he was, Mrs. Dartle, but he found some pressing business that took him back a great deal sooner than he expected.' 'La!' says I, 'what a pity! You ain't seen him for so long, and you was so attached to him!' And she says, just as cold as an ice-pitcher, 'I shall miss him very much. Have you seen my new heliotrope, Mrs. Dartle?' So I couldn't say anything more, but I declare to man I'd give a penny to know what's the matter--such friends as they used to be, too! You may depend upon it the fault's on his side. Mebbe he's done something dreadful."

So things got whispered around, not very much to the credit of Mr. Aubrey, but after Mrs. Dartle's rebuff no one dared question Miss Linton, knowing her so well.

Day succeeded day, and no one knew the bitterness that filled Miss Linton's heart so full that it seemed as if it must burst. Then came a letter from Philip. "Shall I open it? No, I will send it back. That he should dare to write again!" One mail followed another, and still the letter was unsent, was unopened. At last, after a fortnight had passed, her good sense got the better of her ill-feeling, and she said to herself, "I will at least see what he can say for himself in excuse. I need not answer it." So she opened it, and read as follows:

BROOKSIDE, October 8, 1872.

MY MUCH-ABUSED COUSIN: I dare not even _hope_ that you will not return this unopened. But if you do open it I hope you may read what I have to say without _too_ bitter feelings. Where shall I commence to tell you my story?

You know what you said in regard to "making up" news, and one day as I was out riding my horse _did_ land me at my own fence in the way I described. For weeks I lay on a bed of the most excruciating torture. Then I began to recover, and although I was confined to a sofa my faculties were on the alert, and I was pretty nearly distracted for something to do to amuse myself with. Finally, a brilliant idea struck me, and you were the victim of its execution. Believe me, believe me, Bessie dear, I only meant it for the harmless amusement of a week or two, but I became so interested in your letters to my imaginary friend that I could not bear to give them up. I had, Bessie, as I told you, learned to love you from your letters. They were so precious to me, it seemed like tearing from me a part of my very life to think of letting you know how I had deceived you, and so closing all the correspondence (which meant so much to me) between us. You will say I was cowardly. I _was_: I know it, and I admit it. But, Bessie, Bessie, I loved you so! Let my love plead for me. I thought it would be easier for me to tell you face to face. But God knows the hardest task I ever set myself was telling you how I had deceived you.

Bessie, don't cast me off! Can't you find a little corner in your heart wherein I may rest? Let me be your cousin: of course I dare not hope ever to be anything dearer. But if you only will forgive me the trick into which I was led by sickness and want of amusement, and afterward continued from love of you, it is all I dare ask.

Ever your devoted PHILIP.

Emotions of various kinds seized the soul of Bessie Linton as she read Philip's letter once, twice, thrice. First, her heart was hardened to anything he might say--then as he told of his sufferings a little pity crept in; and finally, as she concluded the last word for the third time, her heart was so overflowing with pity--which is akin to love--that she--forgave him.

At least, so I suppose, as they passed my window just now laughing, and as happy a married couple as ever you saw, if she _is_ "five years older than he is, and had the bringin' of him up," to use Mrs. Dartle's expression.

E. C. HEWITT.

FROM THE FLATS.

What heartache--ne'er a hill! Inexorable, vapid, vague and chill The drear sand-levels drain my spirit low. With one poor word they tell me all they know; Whereat their stupid tongues, to tease my pain, Do drawl it o'er again and o'er again. They hurt my heart with griefs I cannot name: Always the same, the same.

Nature hath no surprise, No ambuscade of beauty 'gainst mine eyes From brake or lurking dell or deep defile; No humors, frolic forms--this mile, that mile; No rich reserves or happy-valley hopes Beyond the bends of roads, the distant slopes Her fancy fails, her wild is all run tame: Ever the same, the same.

Oh might I through these tears But glimpse some hill my Georgia high uprears, Where white the quartz and pink the pebbles shine, The hickory heavenward strives, the muscadine Swings o'er the slope, the oak's far-falling shade Darkens the dogwood in the bottom-glade, And down the hollow from a ferny nook Bright leaps a living brook!

SIDNEY LANIER.

A DAY'S MARCH THROUGH FINLAND.

"Why don't you go to Imatra?" asks my friend P---- as we lean over the side of the Peterhof steamer and watch the golden domes of St. Petersburg rising slowly from the dull gray level of the Gulf of Finland. "Now that you've seen a bit of Central Russia, that's the next thing for you to do. Go to Imatra, and I'll go too."

"And where on earth _is_ Imatra?" ask I innocently.

"Oh come! you don't mean to say you've never heard of Imatra? Why, everybody knows it. Let's go there next week."

Nevertheless, it so happens that I have _not_ heard of Imatra--an ignorance probably shared by most people out of Russia, and perhaps not a few in it. But I am destined to a speedier acquaintance than I had anticipated with the famous waterfall (or "foss," as the natives call it), which, lying forty miles due north of the Finnish port of Viborg, close to the renowned "Saima Lake," attracts the amateur fishermen of St. Petersburg by scores every summer.

The proposed trip comes at an auspicious moment, for St. Petersburg in July is as thoroughly a "city of the dead" as London in September or Chamouni in January; and the average tourist, having eaten cabbage-soup at Wolff's or Dominique's, promenaded the Nevski Prospect and bought photographs in the Gostinni-Dvor (the Russian Regent street and Burlington Arcade), witnessed a service in the Isaac Church, and perhaps gone on to Moscow to stare at the Kremlin and the Monster Bell, must either await the approach of winter or fall back upon the truly British consolation of being able to "say that he has been there." Then is the time for suburban or rural jaunts; for picnics at Peterhof and drives to Oranienbaum; for wandering through the gardens of Catherine II. at Tsarskoe-Selo ("Czar's Village") and eating curds and cream at Pavlovski; for surveying the monastery of Strelna or the batteries of Cronstadt; or, finally, for taking the advice of my roving friend and going to Imatra.

Accordingly, behold all our preparations made--knapsacks packed, tear-and-wear garments put in requisition, many-colored Russian notes exchanged (at a fearful discount) for dingy Finnish silver[D]--and at half-past ten on a not particularly bright July morning we stand on the deck of the anything but "good ship" Konstantin, bound for Viborg.

Despite her tortoise qualities as a steamer, however (which prolong our voyage to nearly nine hours), the vessel is really luxurious in her accommodations; and were her progress even slower, the motley groups around us (groups such as only Dickens could describe or Leech portray) would sufficiently beguile the time--jaunty boy-officers in brand-new uniforms, gallantly puffing their _papirossi_ (paper cigarettes) in defiance of coming nausea, and discussing the merits of the new opera loud enough to assure every one within earshot that they know nothing whatever about it; squat Finnish peasants, whose round, puffy faces and thick yellow hair are irresistibly suggestive of overboiled apple-dumplings; gray-coated Russian soldiers, with the dogged endurance of their race written in every line of their patient, solid, unyielding faces; a lanky Swede, whose huge cork hat and broad collar give him the look of an exaggerated medicine-bottle; the inevitable tourist in the inevitable plaid suit, struggling with endless convolutions of fishing-tackle and hooking himself in a fresh place at every turn; three or four pale-faced clerks on leave, looking very much as if their "overwork" had been in some way connected with cigars and bad brandy; a German tradesman from Vasili-Ostroff (with the short turnip-colored moustache characteristic of Wilhelm in his normal state), in dutiful attendance on his wife, who is just completing her preparations for being comfortably ill as soon as the vessel starts; and a fine specimen of the real British merchant, talking vehemently (in a miraculous dialect of his own invention) to a Russian official, whose air of studied politeness shows plainly that he does not understand a word of his neighbor's discourse.

Directly we go off the rain comes on, with that singular fatality characteristic of pleasure-trips in general, arising, doubtless, from the mysterious law which ordains that a man shall step into a puddle the instant he has had his boots blacked, and that a piece of bread-and-butter shall fall (how would Sir Isaac Newton have accounted for it?) with the buttered side downward. In a trice the deck is deserted by all save two or three self-devoted martyrs in macintosh, who "pace the plank" with that air of stern resolution worn by an Englishman when dancing a quadrille or discharging any other painful duty. The scenery throughout the entire voyage consists chiefly of fog, relieved by occasional patches of sand-bank; and small wonder if the superior attractions of the well-spread dinner-table detain most of our fellow-sufferers below. What is this first dish that they offer us? _Raw salmon_, by the shade of Soyer! sliced thin and loaded with pepper. Then follow soup, fried trout, roast beef, boiled ditto, slices of German sausage, neck of veal and bacon, fried potatoes and cabbage. Surely, now, "Hold, enough!" Not a bit of it: enter an enormous plum-pudding, which might do duty for a globe at any provincial school; next, a dish of rice and preserve, followed by some of the strongest conceivable cheese; finally, strawberries, and bilberries, with cream and sugar _ad libitum_. Involuntarily I recall the famous old American story of the "boss" at a railway refreshment-room who demanded fifty cents extra from a passenger who stuck to the table after all the rest had dined and gone away. "Your board says, 'Dinner, three dollars and fifty cents!'" remonstrated the victim.--"Ah! that's all very well for reasonable human bein's with one stomach apiece," retorted the Inexorable; "but when a feller eats _as if there were no hereafter_, we've got to pile it on!"

As we pass Cronstadt the fog "lifts" slightly, giving us a momentary glimpse of the huge forts that guard the passage--the locked door which bars out Western Europe. There is nothing showy or pretentious about these squat, round-shouldered, narrow-eyed sentinels of the channel; but they have a grim air of reserved strength, as though they could be terribly effective in time of need. Two huge forts now command the "southern channel," in addition to the four which guarded it at the time of the Baltic expedition during the Crimean war; and the land-batteries (into which no outsider is now admitted without special permission) are being strengthened by movable shields of iron and other appliances of the kind, for which nearly one million roubles (one hundred and fifty thousand pounds) have been set apart. The seaward approaches are commanded by numerous guns of formidable calibre, and far away on the long, level promontory of the North Spit we can just descry a dark excrescence--the battery recently constructed for the defence of the "northern passage." Thus, from the Finnish coast to Oranienbaum a bristling line of unbroken fortification proclaims Russia's aversion to war, and the gaping mouths of innumerable cannon announce to all who approach, with silent eloquence, that "L'empire c'est la paix." It is a fine political parable that the Western traveler's first glimpse of Russian civilization should assume the form of a line of batteries, reminding one of poor Mungo Park's splendid unconscious sarcasm, when, while wandering helplessly in the desert, he came suddenly upon a gibbet with a man hanging in chains upon it; "Whereupon," says he, "I kneeled down and gave hearty thanks to Almighty God, who had been pleased to conduct me once more into a Christian and civilized country."

As the afternoon creeps on the rain seems to fall heavier, the fog to brood thicker, the steamer to go (if possible) slower than before. However, everything earthly has an end except a suit in chancery; and by nightfall (if there _be_ any nightfall in this wonderful region, where it is lighter at midnight than in England at daybreak) we reach Viborg, a neat little town built along the edge of a narrow inlet, with the straight, wide, dusty streets which characterize every Russian town from Archangelsk to Sevastopol. Along the edge of the harbor runs a well laid-out promenade, a favorite resort after sunset, when the cool breeze from the gulf comes freshly in after the long, sultry hours of the afternoon. Behind it cluster, like a heap of colored pebbles, the painted wooden houses of the town; while over all stands, like a veteran sentinel, the gray massive tower of the old castle, frowning upon the bristling masts of the harbor like the Past scowling at the Present.

The rippling sea in front and the dark belt of forest behind give the whole place a very picturesque appearance; but the beauty of the latter is sorely marred by the destroying sweep of a recent hurricane, traces of which are still visible in the long swathes of fallen trees that lie strewn amid the greenwood, like the dead among the living.

In the solemn, subdued light of the northern evening we rattle in a crazy drosky over the uneven stones of the town into the vast desolate square in which stands the solitary hotel, a huge barrack-like building, up and down which we wander for some time, like the prince in the Sleeping Beauty's palace, without meeting any sign of life, till at length in a remote corner we come suddenly upon a chubby little waiter about the size of a well-grown baby, to whom we give our orders. This, however, is his first and last appearance, for every time we ring a different waiter, of the same diminutive size, answers the bell; which oppresses us with an undefined apprehension of having got into a charity-school by mistake.

When I first made the acquaintance of Viborg, a journey thither from St. Petersburg, though the distance by land is only about eighty miles, was no light undertaking. The daring traveler who elected to travel by road had no choice but to provide himself with abundant wrappings and a good stock of food, draw his strong boots up to his knee, fortify his inner man with scalding tea or fiery corn-whisky, and struggle through axle-deep mud or breast-high snow (according to the season), sometimes for two days together. "Mais nous avons changé tout cela." Two trains run daily from St. Petersburg, covering the whole distance in about four hours, and the stations along the line, though bearing marks of hasty construction, are still sufficiently comfortable and well supplied with provisions. Thanks to this direct communication with the capital, Viborg is now completely _au fait_ of the news of the day, and all fashionable topics are canvassed as eagerly on the promenade of this little Finnish seaport as along the pavements of the Nevski Prospect.

"We must breakfast early to-morrow, mind," says P---- as we settle into our respective beds, "for a march in the sun here is no joke, you bet!"

"Worse than in Arabia or South America?" ask I with calm scorn.

"You'll find the north of Russia a pretty fair match for both at this season. Do you happen to know that one of the hottest places in the world is Archangelsk on the White Sea? In summer the pitch melts off the vessels like butter, and the mosquitoes are so thick that the men on board the grain-ships fairly burrow into the corn for shelter.[E] Good-night! Sharp six to-morrow, mind!"

Accordingly, the early daylight finds us tramping along the edge of the picturesque little creek (dappled here and there with wood-crowned islets) in order to get well into our work before the sun is high in the sky, for a forty-mile march, knapsack on shoulder, across a difficult country, in the heat of a real Russian summer, is not a thing to be trifled with, even by men who have seen Turkey and Syria. A sudden turn of the road soon blots out the sea, and we plunge at once into the green silent depths of the northern forest.

It is characteristic of the country that, barely out of sight of one of the principal ports of Finland, we are in the midst of a loneliness as utter as if it had never been broken by man. The only tokens of his presence are the narrow swathe of road running between the dim, unending files of the shadowy pine trees, and the tall wooden posts, striped black and white like a zebra, which mark the distance in versts from Viborg, the verst being two-thirds of a mile.

To an unpractised eye the marvelous smoothness and hardness of this forest highway (unsurpassed by any macadamized road in England) might suggest a better opinion of the local civilization than it deserves; for in this case it is the soil, not the administration, that merits all the credit. In granite-paved Finland, as in limestone-paved Barbados, Nature has already laid down your road in a way that no human engineering can rival, and all you have to do is to smooth it to your own liking.

And now the great panorama of the far North--a noble change from the flat unending monotony of the Russian steppes--begins in all its splendor. At one moment we are buried in a dark depth of forest, shadowy and spectral as those which haunt us in the weird outlines of Retzsch; the next minute we burst upon an open valley, bright with fresh grass, and with a still, shining lake slumbering in the centre, the whole picture framed in a background of sombre woods. Here rise giant boulders of granite, crested with spreading pines--own brothers, perhaps, of the block dragged hence eighty years ago from which the greatest of Russian rulers still looks down upon the city that bears his name;[F] there, bluffs of wooded hill rear themselves above the surrounding sea of foliage, and at times the roadside is dotted with the little wooden huts of the natives, whence wooden-faced women, turbaned with colored handkerchiefs, and white-headed children, in nothing but a short night-gown with a warm lining of dirt, stare wonderingly at us as we go striding past. And over all hangs the clear, pearly-gray northern sky.

One hour is past, and still the air keeps moderately fresh, although the increasing glare warns us that it will be what I once heard a British tourist call "more hotterer" by and by. So far, however, we have not turned a hair, and the second hour's work matches the first to an inch. As we pass through the little hamlet which marks the first quarter of our allotted distance we instinctively pull out our watches: "Ten miles in two hours! Not so bad, but we must keep it up."

So we set ourselves to the third hour, and out comes the sun--bright and beautiful and destroying as Homer's Achilles:

Bright are his rays, but evil fate they send, And to sad man destroying heat portend.

Hitherto, despite the severity of our pace, we have contrived to keep up a kind of flying conversation, but now grim silence settles on our way. There is a point in every match against time when the innate ferocity of man, called forth by the exercises which civilization has borrowed from the brute creation, comes to the front in earnest--when your best friend becomes your deadly enemy, and the fact of his being one stride in advance of you is an injury only to be atoned by blood. Such is the precise point that we have reached now; and when we turn from exchanging malignant looks with each other, it is only to watch with ominous eagerness for the coming in sight of the painted verst-posts, which somehow appear to succeed one another far more slowly than they did an hour ago.

By the middle of the fourth hour we are marching with coats off and sleeves rolled up, like amateur butchers; and although our "pace" is as good as ever, the elastic swing of our first start is now replaced by that dogged, "hard-and-heavy" tramp which marks the point where the flesh and the spirit begin to pull in opposite directions. Were either of us alone, the pace would probably slacken at once, and each may safely say in his heart, as Condorcet said of the dying D'Alembert, "Had I not been there he _must_ have flinched!"

But just as the fourth hour comes to an end (during which we have looked at our watches as often as Wellington during the terrible mid-day hours that preceded the distant boom of the Prussian cannon) we come round a sharp bend in the road, and there before us lies the quaint little log-built post-house (the "halfway house" in very truth), with its projecting roof and painted front and striped doorposts; just at which auspicious moment I stumble and twist my foot.

"You were right to reserve _that_ performance to the last," remarks P---- with a grin, helping me to the door; and we order a _samovar_ (tea-urn) to be heated, while we ourselves indulge in a scrambling wash of the rudest kind, but very refreshing nevertheless.

Reader, did you ever walk five miles an hour for four hours together over a hilly country, with the thermometer at eighty-three degrees in the shade? If so, then will you appreciate our satisfaction as we throw aside our heavy boots, plunge our swollen feet into cold water, and, with coats off and collars thrown open, sit over our tea and black bread in that quaint little cross-beamed room, with an appetite never excited by the best _plats_ of the Erz-Herzog Karl or the Trois Frères Provençaux. Two things, at least, one may always be sure of finding in perfection at a Russian post-station: tea is the one; the other I need not particularize, as its presence does not usually become apparent till you "retire to rest" (?).

Our meal being over and my foot still unfit for active service, we order a _telyayga_ (cart) and start anew for Imatra Foss. Our vehicle is simply a wooden tray on wheels, with a bag of hay in it, on which we do our best to recline, while our driver perches himself on the edge of the cart, thereby doubtless realizing vividly the sensation of rowing hard in a pair of thin unmentionables. Thanks to the perpetual gaps in the road formed by the great thaw two months ago (the Finnish winter ending about the beginning of May), during the greater part of the ride we play an animated though involuntary game of cup-and-ball, being thrown up and caught again incessantly. At length a dull roar, growing ever louder and louder, breaks the dreamy stillness of the forest, and before long we come to a little chalet-like inn embosomed in trees, where we alight, for this is the "Imatra Hotel."

Let us cast one glance out of the back window before sitting down to supper (in a long, bare, chilly chamber like a third-class waiting-room), for such a view is not seen every day. We are on the very brink of a deep narrow gorge, the upper part of which is so thickly clad with pines as to resemble the crest of some gigantic helmet, but beneath the naked granite stands out in all its grim barrenness, lashed by the spray of the mighty torrent that roars between its projecting rocks. Just below us, the river, forced back by a huge boulder in the centre of its course, literally piles itself up into a kind of liquid mound, foaming, flashing and trembling incessantly, the ceaseless motion and tremendous din of the rapids having an indescribably bewildering effect.

On quitting our inn the next morning a very picturesque walk of half an hour brings us to a little hut beside the Saima Ferry, where we find a party of "three fishers" from St. Petersburg, comprising a Russian colonel, an ex-chasseur d'Afrique (now an actor at one of the Russian theatres) and an Englishman. The three give us a cordial welcome, and insist upon our joining them; and for the next few days our surroundings are savagely picturesque enough to satisfy Jean-Jacques himself--living in a cabin of rough-hewn logs plastered with mud, sleeping on a bundle of straw, with our knapsacks for a pillow; tramping for miles every day through the sombre pine forest or fishing by moonlight in the shadowy lake, with the silence of a newly-created world all around; and having an "early pull" every morning across the ferry with our host, a squat, yellow-haired, gnome-like creature in sheepskin frock and bark shoes, who manifests unbounded amazement every time he sees us washing our hands.

But the lake itself is, if possible, even more picturesque than the river. It is one of those long, straggling bodies of water so common in the far North, resembling not so much one great lake as an endless series of small ones. Just at the sortie of the river a succession of rapids, scarcely less magnificent than those of the "Foss" itself, rush between the wooded shores, their unresting whirl and fury contrasting gloriously with the vast expanse of glassy water above, crested with leafy islets and mirroring the green boughs that droop over it along the shore. Here did we spend many a night fishing and "spinning yarns," in both of which accomplishments the ex-chasseur was pre-eminent; and strange enough it seemed, lying in the depths of that northern forest, to listen to descriptions of the treeless sands of Egypt and the burning wastes of the Sahara. Our midnight camp, on a little promontory just above the rapids, was a study for Rembrandt--the slender pine-stems reddened by the blaze of our camp-fire; the group of bearded faces coming and going as the light waxed and waned; beyond the circle of light a gloom all the blacker for the contrast; the ghostly white of the foam shimmering through the leaves, and the clear moonlit sky overhanging all.

When a wet day came upon us the inexhaustible ex-chasseur (who, like Frederick the Great, could "do everything but keep still") amused himself and us with various experiments in cookery, of which art he was a perfect master. His versatility in sauces might have aroused the envy of Soyer himself, and the party having brought with them a large stock of provisions, he was never at a loss for materials. Our ordinary dinner consisted of trout sauced with red wine, mutton, veal, duck, cheese, fresh strawberries and coffee; after which every man took his tumbler of tea, with a slice of lemon in it, from the stove, and the evening began.

_The_ sight of the country, however, is undoubtedly the natives themselves. Their tawny skins, rough yellow hair and coarse flat faces would look uninviting enough to those who have never seen a Kalmuck or a Samoyede, but, despite their diet of dried fish and bread mixed with sawdust, both men and women are remarkably healthy and capable of surprising feats of strength and endurance. They make great use of bark for caps, shoes, plates, etc., in the making of which they are very skillful. As to their dress, it baffles description, and the horror of my friend the ex-chasseur at his first glimpse of it was as good as a play. On one occasion he was criticising severely the "rig" of some passing natives: "Voilà un qui porte un pantalon et point de bottes--un autre qui a des bottes et point de pantalon; peut-être que le troisième n'aura ni l'un ni l'autre!" At last came one with a pair of boots almost big enough to go to sea in, and turned up like an Indian canoe. Our critic eyed them in silence for a moment, and then said with a shudder, "Ce sont des bottes impossibles!"

But there needs only a short journey here to show the folly of further annexations on the part of Russia while those already made are so lamentably undeveloped. Finland, which, rightly handled, might be one of the czar's richest possessions, is now, after nearly seventy years' occupation, as unprofitable as ever. Throughout the whole province there are only three hundred and ninety-eight miles of railway.[G] Post-roads, scarce enough in the South, are absolutely wanting in the North. Steam navigation on the Gulf of Bothnia extends only to Uleaborg, and is, so far as I can learn, actually non-existent on the great lakes, except between Tanasthuus and Tammerfors. Such is the state of a land containing boundless water-power, countless acres of fine timber, countless shiploads of splendid granite. But what can be expected of an untaught population under two millions left to themselves in an unreclaimed country nearly as large as France?

Helsingfors can now be reached from St. Petersburg, _viâ_ Viborg, in fourteen and a half hours; but what is one such line to the boundless emptiness of Finland? The fearful lesson of 1869 will not be easily forgotten, when all the horrors of famine were let loose at once upon the unhappy province. Seed-corn was exhausted: bread became dear, dearer still, and then failed altogether. Men, women and children, struggling over snowy moors and frozen lakes toward the distant towns in which lay their only chance of life, dropped one by one on the long march of death, and were devoured ere they were cold by the pursuing wolves. Nor did the survivors fare much better: some reached the haven of refuge only to fall dead in its very streets. Others gorged themselves with unwholesome food, and died with it in their mouths. Fields lying waste; villages dispeopled; private houses turned into hospitals; fever-parched skeletons tottering from the doors of overcrowded asylums; children wandering about in gaunt and squalid nakedness; crowds of men, frenzied by prolonged misery and ripe for any outrage, roaming the streets night and day,--such were the scenes enacted throughout the length of Finland during two months and a half.

But better days are now dawning on the afflicted land. Roads and railways are being pushed forward into the interior, and the ill-judged attempts formerly made to Russianize the population have given place to a more conciliatory policy. A Russian from Helsingfors tells me that lectures are being delivered there, and extracts from native works read, in the aboriginal tongue; that it is being treated with special attention in the great schools of Southern Finland; that there has even been some talk of dramatic representations in Finnish at the Helsingfors theatre. Such a policy is at once prudent and generous, and far better calculated to bind together the heterogeneous races of the empire than that absurd "Panslavism" which is best translated as "making every one a slave."

DAVID KER.

FOOTNOTES:

[D] Finland still retains its own currency of "marks" and "pennia."

[E] A fact.

[F] The statue of Peter the Great stands at the corner of the Senate-House Square, overlooking the Neva, on a block of Finnish granite twenty feet high.

[G] Since this was written two new lines have been opened.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.

THE DEAD OF PARIS.

It is an expensive operation to die in Paris, particularly for a foreigner. If an unhappy American chances to pay the debt of Nature in a furnished apartment or a hotel, the proprietor makes the heirs of the deceased pay roundly for the privilege which their relation has enjoyed. No matter by what manner of death the departed may have made his or her exit, be it chronic or epidemic--anything so impossible to communicate as heart disease or apoplexy, for instance--every article in the room must be paid for at its full value, or rather quadruple that amount. As much as one thousand dollars has sometimes been charged for the plenishing of a room, everything in which, if put up at auction, would not have realized a tenth part of that amount. Through the efforts of our representatives, however, this tax has been fixed at a somewhat less exorbitant amount.

Parisian funerals are conducted by a company--which, like most of such enterprises in France, is a gigantic monopoly--under the direct supervision of the government. The tariff of its charges includes nine grades of funerals, at prices ranging from fifteen hundred dollars down to four dollars. For the first amount the mourners enjoy all the splendors possible to the occasion--a hearse draped with velvet and drawn by four horses, each decked with ostrich-plumes and led by a groom clothed in a mourning livery; velvet draperies sprinkled with silver tears for the porte-cochère wherein the coffin lies in state; and grand funeral lamps lit with spirits to flame around the bier at the church. For the last tariff a pine coffin painted black, a stretcher and two men to bear the body to the _fosse commune_, are accorded. But between these two extremes lies every variety of funeral that one can imagine, a very respectable affair with two mourning carriages being offered for about sixty dollars. Very few Americans are ever interred in a Paris cemetery, the prejudices of our nation exacting that the remains of the dead should be transferred to their native land. To the foreigner this process appears to be inexplicable, for, as a French gentleman once remarked to me with a shrug of his shoulders, "Only the Americans and English are fond of making corpses travel" (_de faire voyager leurs morts_). They generally prefer to call in the services of the embalmer, who for a charge of six hundred dollars will do his work wisely if not too well. Still, there are some graves of our fellow-citizens still visible even at Père la Chaise. And at that historic cemetery for years there existed a beautiful spot, a sort of hollow on the hillside, where flowers, trees and grass all flourished luxuriantly, thanks to years of neglect. It was a wild and lovely oasis of Nature in the midst of the stiff, artificial formality of the rest of the cemetery, and became one of the sights of the place. Unfortunately, French formality revolted against the untamed charm of this neglected spot: the proprietor, an American gentleman, was sought out, the lot was repurchased by the city, the trees were uprooted, the hollow filled in, and the beautiful ravine exists no longer.

The Compagnie des Pompes Funèbres is obliged to inter the poor gratuitously; nor is this service light, as the number of free funerals is considerably greater than that of paying ones. The city pays one dollar to the company for each pauper funeral. The mass of material possessed by the company is very great, comprising six hundred vehicles of all kinds, three hundred horses, six thousand biers or stretchers, and a vast number of draperies, cushions, torches, etc. Over five hundred and seventy-five men are employed by this organization. Thanks to these ample arrangements, the terrible spectacle afforded during the cholera outbreaks of 1832 and 1849, when the dead were conveyed to the cemeteries piled in upholsterers' wagons, is not likely to be renewed, as during the exceptional mortality from the same cause in 1854 and 1865 the arrangements were found to suffice for all demands.

In olden times Paris was full of cemeteries: they were attached to every hospital and every church. The wealthy were interred in the churches themselves: in the church of Les Innocents, which was specially affected by the nobility, the aisles were often crowded with coffins awaiting their turn to be placed in the overcrowded vaults. Nobody troubled himself about the sanitary side of the question in those days, as witness the cemetery of Saint Roch, which in 1763 was established beside one of the city wells. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cemeteries were popular places of resort. Les Innocents was especially popular: it was surrounded by arcades, where booths and stores were established, and people came there to promenade and to amuse themselves. Nor were private cemeteries unknown, many prominent Jewish and Protestant families being privileged to inter their dead (to whom the Church denied burial in consecrated ground) in the gardens attached to their houses. Thus, when the work of reconstructing Paris under the Second Empire was begun, the enormous quantity of graves that were discovered filled the workers with amaze. The bones thus found were at first transferred to the Western Cemetery, which had been closed for over twenty years, but the accumulation speedily became unmanageable, and when a mass of over three thousand square feet of bones had been deposited there, a decree of the authorities caused the whole and all similar discoveries to be deposited in the catacombs.

The Revolution did away with the greater part of the intramural cemeteries by suppressing those attached to the churches and declaring the ground to be national property: they were consequently parceled out into lots and sold. But the guillotine created a need for new burial-grounds, two of which were accordingly established. One, situated near the Place du Trône, still exists: it occupies the former site of the gardens of the Dames Chauvinesses de Picpus. After the Revolution it was purchased by an association of the surviving members of families who had relatives interred there. This cemetery ought to be a pilgrim shrine for every American visiting Paris, for it was chosen as a last resting-place for the remains of La Fayette. The other "garden of the guillotine," as these cemeteries were once significantly called, has long since disappeared, but the Chapelle Expiatoire erected to the memory of Marie Antoinette and of Louis XVI. on the Boulevard Haussmann now marks its former site. It was there that the bodies of these royal victims of revolutionary fury were hastily interred in a bed of quicklime, with a thick layer of quicklime cast over each of them. When, after the Restoration, the task of exhuming the royal remains was undertaken, crumbling bones alone remained to point out the resting-place of the once beautiful daughter of the Cæsars and of the descendant of Saint Louis. The smaller bones of the skeleton of Louis XVI., in particular, had almost wholly disappeared: that of the queen was in better preservation, owing to a smaller quantity of quicklime having been used. Strange to say, her garters, which were of elastic webbing, were found in a state of almost perfect preservation, while of the rest of her garments only a few rotting fragments remained. These garters, together with some pieces of the coffins, were presented as precious relics to Louis XVIII. But grave doubts have frequently been expressed, in view of the very slight means of identification afforded by the state of the remains, as to whether these crumbling relics of mortality were really those of the king and queen. With the exception of the plot on which stands the Chapelle Expiatoire, every vestige of the revolutionary cemetery has long since disappeared. The splendid Boulevard Haussmann now passes directly over its site, and the gayety and animation of one of the most brilliant quarters of modern Paris surround what was once the last resting-place of those who perished by the guillotine on the Place de la Révolution.

The present system of Parisian cemeteries was only adopted at the beginning of this century. Paris now possesses twenty, the most important of which are Père la Chaise and Montparnasse. The ground of all of these belongs to the city. You can purchase a lot to be held for ever, or you can buy a temporary concession, the price varying with the length of time for which the ground is to be held. Five years is the shortest period for which a lot can be accorded, as experts declare that the body is not wholly absorbed into the surrounding earth before that time.

What shall Paris do with her dead? is now becoming a very serious question. It is against the law to bury bodies within her limits, yet fourteen out of her twenty cemeteries are within her bounds, and the vast city, spreading out on either side, soon catches up with those established on her exterior territories.

It has been proposed to construct a new and immense cemetery at a distance of some twenty or thirty miles from the city, to which the funeral cortéges could be transferred by rail. But the strong sentiment of the French for the dead has as yet prevented the realization of this very sensible and really necessary project. As a rule, the French are very fond of visiting the graves of their departed relatives, and on the great anniversary for such visits, "Le Jour des Morts," it is calculated that over half a million persons are present in the different cemeteries during the day. On such occasions not only are wreaths of natural flowers, of beads and of immortelles deposited on the tombs, but often the visiting-cards of the persons who have come to pay due respect to the dead. The tomb of Rachel, for instance, has been specially honored in that way, some of the visitors even turning up the corner of the card to show that they had called in person. The question suggests itself, _What if the visit should be returned?_ Edgar A. Poe might have found in this idea material for one of his weird and wondrous tales. We all know what happened when Don Juan in merry fashion begged that the statue of his former victim would come to take supper with him.

The French authorities have indeed purchased a vast tract of ground at Méry-sur-Oise, distant from Paris about one hour by rail, with intent to found there a vast central necropolis, but the prejudices or indifference of the Parisian populace have as yet prevented the realization of this project. Something must be done, however, and that speedily. Were cremation an established fact, that would settle the whole matter, but the French, who always seem to get an attack of piety in the wrong place, are horrified at such an idea. It is probable, therefore, that a law will be adopted, such as is now in force in Switzerland, making all concessions of burial-lots merely temporary. Such a law is already talked of, and the duration of the longest concession is fixed at ten years. A regulation of this kind would of course do away with much of the elegance of decoration that now distinguishes the Parisian cemeteries, as few families would care to erect costly monuments over a grave that must be vacated at the end of ten years.

L. H. H.

THE RELIGIOUS STRUGGLE AT GENEVA.

Even for a chance resident in Geneva, for a disinterested stranger to the strife, the Ultramontane and Old Catholic question is no more to be avoided than the _bise_ which blows in the month of November upon the just and the unjust. You take the longest way round through the sheltered streets, if you like, but the terrific north wind is certain to catch you at the first square you cross. And you may say you have no particular interest in the war of churches, and no adequate means of forming a judgment: you still hear a good deal that is said, and read much that is written, on the burning topic. If a supporter of the ruling party describes what occurred some months since at Bellerive on the lake shore, when a company of gendarmes marched into the village, took possession of the church, set the Swiss cross floating from the steeple and established the new _curé_ by force of arms, in place of the Ultramontane incumbent, who had long defied the cantonal authorities and remained at his post in spite of reiterated orders to depart, the impression you receive is that of the might and majesty of the law triumphant. What else can be done, they ask, when the government of the land is flouted in open scorn? What, indeed? And the counter-display of banners by the vanquished party on that eventful day illustrated, it would appear, the well-known step from the sublime to the ridiculous. Every black rag on which they could lay hands dangled from the windows of the faithful in sign of distress: not even a petticoat rather the worse for wear but did duty on the occasion. And yet one thoroughly convinced of the puerility of such demonstrations may also think that the Swiss flag itself has been unfurled in causes more glorious.

"The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church," say the persecuted. "Where the government has put in an apostate priest, he celebrates mass to empty benches: we set up our altar in a barn, and it is full to overflowing." So far as this city is concerned, the statement is correct. The place of worship to which the Ultramontanes retired when driven from the cathedral of Notre Dame may, if they choose, be called a barn--a large one--and it is furnished with a goodly congregation, whereas the forty or fifty persons who assemble in their former church look no more than "a handful of corn upon the mountains." It must be admitted also that in sowing after the manner of the martyrs the Ultramontanes are ready and willing, and should the official rigors be insufficient they will perhaps do a little private bloodletting for the sake of contributing handsomely to the support of their cause. The Sisters of Charity, expelled from Geneva last year as exercising a pernicious influence, are said to have opened all their veins before they went. Excepting that blood, however, it is not apparent that they lost a great deal: they merely crossed the boundary into France, can revisit the scene of their martyrdom whenever they please, and moreover, in their present quality of strangers, the government has lost the right of interference with their apparel, so that the stiff white bonnets may now walk with impunity under the very nose of a _conseiller d'état_. The inhabitants of the canton are severely restricted as to costume under the present régime. No native priest is permitted a distinctive dress, and where a couple of large hats and long skirts are seen strolling through the streets, you know they are from over the border. Jesuitism is not to parade in full uniform, nor is it to lurk privily under never so humble a roof. In their struggles with the hydra-headed monster the men in the high places of this canton found themselves lately face to face with an odd set of opponents. An association of servant-girls, animated by the spirit of party, had stepped into the vacant quarters of the Sisters--a locality already confiscated by the government. The object of the society is praiseworthy: it provides a home for servants out of place, and nurses and maintains such as are sick or destitute. Still, the powers that be thought such Christian charity might be exercised as well elsewhere, and sent a notice to quit, of which the domestics, with a traditional contempt for lawful authority, made no account whatever. They were threatened with the police, but still stood firm, and not until an armed force actually descended upon them did they retire in good order, bearing one of their company on a mattress. Those interested in their behalf call attention to the fact that the sick person had to be transported through the streets on the coldest day of the season, while the party of the gendarmerie cause it to be understood that said person only took to her bed when the judicial knock sounded at the door.

Scandalous wrangling, petty bickering, the zealous wrath of true conviction on either side,--there is room for them all in a contest like this, where every one must wear the badge of party in plain sight, and defend it as best he may, but defend it at all costs. To stand between two such hostile forces is to be regarded as an enemy by both, and is a situation that may seem equivocal even to lookers-on. Yet those who listen habitually to the one man who has chosen that unenviable post can hardly complain of want of clearness in his own defining of his position. Père Hyacinthe is sometimes held to be on the high road to Protestantism. Any one who went out in the middle of some discourse of his, and so heard only the warm-hearted, candid confession of sympathy with all that is excellent among heretics, might carry away such an impression: those who remain until the inevitable "_mais_" with which the second proposition begins are convinced that to grasp the hand he holds out for Church unity the Protestants would have many more steps to take than he contemplates on his side, and that the meeting could by no means be a halfway one. Another numerously-supported opinion is that of his waiting only for a good opportunity to return to the true fold. Certain it is that at all times and in all places he calls himself a faithful son of that Church of which, as he ceases not to reiterate, he has never sought the ruin, but the reform. Who, however, hearing the scathing apostrophe that follows to the address of the misguided old man who holds the keys of St. Peter can feel that this son of Rome, devoted though he be, is very ready to sue for pardon? On the contrary, let the shepherd repent, then the wandering sheep may come back to the flock. A weightier charge against him than any other is that of betraying party, of faithlessly turning his back on the cause he once espoused. But that cause is still his, as he declares: no one has more at heart the success of the Old Catholic movement than he, no one a warmer desire to see the purified Church in the place that is hers of right; but also no one has a deeper abhorrence of that Church lending herself as a servant to political intrigues, be the government that sets them on foot called despotic or republican. And then the Grand Conseil comes in for no little scorn and contempt. Père Hyacinthe may be a Jesuit in disguise, or a Calvinist at heart, or a broken reed that pierces the hand of him who leans on it; but there is still another hypothesis: he may be a man endowed with the rare gift of seeing all sides of a question with equal impartiality, and one not to be deterred by any party considerations from speaking his free opinion: in that case it is certain that he would find no place in either of the factions at variance in this commonwealth.

How large the number of those who followed Père Hyacinthe when he took up his present isolated position it would be difficult to estimate, for the services at the Casino are attended by others besides his own flock; Sunday after Sunday the barren concert-hall is filled, but many faces wear an expectant look that distinguishes them as passing strangers from the frequenters of the place; and when the mass begins there is evident doubt in the minds of some how far loyalty to their own simpler forms permits them to unite in this worship. They solve the question by standing up whenever a change of position seems to be called for; and in fact to kneel in the narrow, crowded seats is almost impossible, so that the front row, with more space at its disposal, may be properly expected to act as proxy for all the rest. There comes a moment, however, that unites Catholic and Protestant under one spell: it is when the first word falls from the lips of the great speaker. Whatever the subject, whether Catholic reform or the state of the soul after death, a breathless stillness bears witness to enchained attention. Such a theme as the latter must lead far from the daily ways of thought that many tread who listen: when the silver tongue ceases, one may murmur to another, "Mystical!" and yet a very untranscendental mind, borne upward for the moment by that wondrous eloquence, might well catch some vision of a mysterious bond between the Church militant and the Church triumphant--might all but feel a tie linking that strangely-mingled assemblage with the Blessed Company of All Saints.

G. H. P.

THE COMING ELECTIONS IN FRANCE.

The crisis brought about in France by Marshal MacMahon's _coup de palais_ of May 16, 1877, has thrown the country just four years back. Circumstances widely different in character from those which caused the overthrow of M. Thiers on May 24, 1873, have once more placed the government in the hands of men of whom the Republic might well have thought itself for ever rid. At that time the blow was struck by a parliamentary majority. This time it is the representative of the executive power who has thought fit to interfere, seeking to substitute an authoritative for a parliamentary government. When MacMahon assumed power he declared that his post was that of "a sentinel who has to watch over the integrity of your sovereign powers;" but it would appear as though the recollection of his own earlier career, his clerical associations and other secret influences at work, had made him ambitious to occupy a higher position. From the post of sentinel he leaps to that of generalissimo; and there can be little doubt as to the cause which the transition is intended to serve.

There is no longer anything to fear from the Legitimists: the death-knell of that party was rung by the Count de Chambord's famous letter of October 30, 1873, declaring his continued adherence to Bourbon principles. Nor is aught to be apprehended from the Orleanists. They--the Centre-Right in the two houses--long hesitated whether to cast in their lot with the Republic, which would annihilate them by absorption with the Centre-Left, or to join the ranks of the so-called Conservatives, who are undoubtedly destined to swamp them in the stream of imperialism. After much swaying to and fro they have, it would seem, at length determined to follow their usual party tactics and go over bodily to the side which appears to them to present the least immediate danger--viz., the Imperialist. There is no disguising the matter. The battle this time will be between the Republicans and the Bonapartists. M. Gambetta, in the course of his eloquent speech of May 4, 1877, cried, "Le cléricalisme, voilà l'ennemi." Powerful, however, as is the clerical party to embarrass, it is not strong enough at the urns to over-turn the Republic. Imperialism alone can hope to do that when, arrayed in fight against the present form of government, it seeks to win over to its side the country population, those six million electors for the most part owners of the soil they till, and on whose decision hinges to a large extent the future of France. These _paysans_ will vote for one of two things--the Republic or the Empire, the marshal-president before the 16th of May, or the marshal-president who "belongs to the Right."

In France this is, in some degree at least, understood, and even now each party is mustering all its forces so as to be prepared for the October elections. The Republicans are already well organized, with their committees and sub-committees awaiting the instructions of their leader. They will proceed to the polls encouraged by their success at the last elections, taking credit for the tranquil state of France up to the 16th of May, 1877, setting forth their moderation when in power, the guarantees they have given for the maintenance of order, and the almost unanimous approbation their conduct of affairs has met with at the hands of the foreign press.

The Bonapartists will put on their panoply of battle, strong in the support of the marshal, his prefects, his mayors and the cohorts of inferior appointees, such as the gendarmes, the rural constabulary, and all that powerful mechanism at the disposal of a government which sets up official candidates with the avowed intention of carrying the elections by the almost irresistible force of French centralization. All who have seen in motion that formidable political machine called a French prefecture know what this implies. It will be recollected that nearly all the prefects have been changed since the 16th of May. The prefect is appointed by the Minister of the Interior, and receives from him every day by telegraph the word of command, while the post brings him official circulars. These orders he in turn communicates to his subordinates, the mayors. The mayors are, it is true, not all appointed by the prefects, those in the rural districts being elected by the town councils. Nevertheless, they are all more or less under the thumb of the prefects. They need the prefect's signature almost every day to stamp some official act; they require government grants for the maintenance of schools, roads and other purposes in their communes; they dare not offend the prefects, under penalty of having men appointed as rural constables, mayors' secretaries and letter-carriers who shall be so many enemies of the mayors and shall thwart them at every step. The prefect thus exercises enormous influence in every commune, both over the mayor and the lower class of appointees. He likewise holds in subjection in the various districts the justices of the peace, whose appointments can be revoked at will should they vote against orders or fail to use their influence on behalf of the official candidate. The prefect also reigns supreme over the brigades of foot and mounted gendarmerie scattered throughout his department. Of course, the gendarmes do not follow a man to the poll to see that he votes to order, but both the gendarmes and the rural constables understand that they are to act as gently toward the liquor-sellers who vote as they are bidden as they are to proceed rigorously against those who contend for the right of private judgment. If the latter get into trouble, they must be made an example of, whereas should the supporters of the official candidates have broken the law, matters may easily be arranged. Besides these instruments, the prefect has his newspaper, containing articles carefully prepared beforehand at Paris, which he has distributed gratuitously among the electors during the whole of the campaign. This newspaper enjoys the patronage of the judicial and official advertisements, for the insertion of which, American readers need scarcely be told, it receives very handsome pay. Even the post-office is made to join in the conspiracy against the opposition candidate, and it is no rare occurrence for the newspapers and the voting tickets issued by the anti-official party to be held back at the post-office until the day after the election.

All these means, and others besides, are used to intimidate the country population. The strength of the administration is paraded before them. A great show of energy--or, to use the expressive French word, _de poigne_--is made. This is done in order that the French peasant, instinctively attracted by a display of power and repelled by an exhibition of weakness, may cast his vote for the man who appears to be the stronger candidate, and who enjoys the friendship of Monsieur le Préfet.

In February, 1876, M. Buffet, then Minister of the Interior, only employed the means above described sparingly and stealthily. The favor with which he viewed the aspirations of the clerical party caused him to allow the Bonapartist machine to get somewhat rusty. In October, 1877, M. de Fourtou, the Bonapartist Minister of the Interior, selected by the marshal and his advisers as the fittest for the post, will, we may rest assured, make ample use of the levers of administrative centralization. His past career furnishes evidence that he will not hesitate an instant to declare as the official nominee, and energetically to support, any anti-Republican candidate having the least chance of success. Under such circumstances in almost every electoral district in the north, centre and west of France there will be a Bonapartist candidate. The situation insensibly recalls Dryden's well-known lines:

To further this, Achitophel unites The malcontents of all the Israelites, Whose differing parties he could wisely join For several ends to serve the same design.

Even in 1876, when they were left to their own resources, the Imperialists were able to carry the election of about a hundred of their adherents. Now, with one of their own party as the leading wire-puller, and with the aid of the not over-scrupulous _préfets à poigne_--who have scarcely forgotten the instruction they received during Napoleon's reign--the Imperialists will not despair of getting another one hundred and fifty, perhaps even two hundred, members into the Chamber.

C. H. H.

VON MOLTKE IN TURKEY.

Artemus Ward, giving his reasons for approving of G. Washington, adduced the pleasing fact that "George never slopped over." Had that king of jokers ever uttered a "sparkling remark" about H. von Moltke (as we may be sure he would have done if he had lived until now), it would most probably have conveyed a very similar idea in equally scintillating language. It is currently reported of the last-named gentleman that he "keeps silence in seven languages." Like the great William of Orange, he is popularly nicknamed in his own country "the silent man" (_der Schweiger_). Perhaps this habitual reticence is one reason why his utterances are received--when he speaks at all--by his countrymen generally with such deep respect and interest; for even the all-powerful Bismarck cannot command, among Germans, a stricter attention to his speeches. And with regard to military subjects at least, it is natural that the rest of the world should not be altogether indifferent to what the famous strategist may have to say.

But this ability to refrain from utterance did not, at an earlier period of his life, prevent his doing what is traditionally asserted to gratify a man's enemies; and patriotic Frenchmen ought to be glad to know that he once wrote a book. Indeed, he has written more than one, but there is one of his productions which is now attracting a great deal of attention. This work is entitled "_Letters on the State of, and Events in, Turkey, from 1835 to 1839_. By Helmuth von Moltke, Captain on the General Staff, afterward General and Field-marshal." At least this is the title under which the book has lately been republished at Berlin. The original designation was a little less overpowering, but quite huge enough, apparently, to smother the young literary effort; for it died quickly, and though some forty years have passed since the first edition appeared (with a warm recommendation from the eminent geographer Karl Ritter), yet the one just issued is only the second. It is now preceded by a short introduction written for the publishers at their urgent request; and no more widely-popular book has appeared in Germany for many years. The people take a vast amount of pleasure in reading the descriptions of their staid, soldierly old field-marshal attired in Oriental garb and figuring among scenes which might have been taken from the _Arabian Nights_.

But, aside from any personal considerations, the book is really a very interesting and valuable one, and unquestionably deserved a better fate than that which overtook it at first. And now that everything connected with Turkey possesses a special interest for the world at large, it will well repay a careful perusal.

"Captain" von Moltke went to Turkey in the thirty-fifth year of his age, and at a time when the public interest in that country was hardly less active than it has been lately. The war of 1828 and 1829, and Sultan Mahmud II.'s energetic action in fighting his foes and undertaking vast internal reforms, had caused the attention of the world to be concentrated upon his affairs. The young German staff-officer intended spending only a few weeks in the Ottoman empire. But the sultan was anxious to avail himself of the services of just such men, and the offer of an appointment as _musteschar_ ("imperial councilor") was too tempting for Von Moltke to refuse. Installed in his office, he soon made his value apparent to both the sultan and Chosrew Pasha, the seraskier, who was in high favor at court, and in a short time a vast number and variety of duties were assigned to him. Was a difficult bridge-building project to be carried out, he was the man to make it a success; did the sultan's palace need to have another tower perched upon it, he must direct the work: in fact, it seemed to be the prevailing impression that the advice and assistance of "Moltke Pasha" were good things to have in any situation.

His good standing in high government circles made him much sought after by Turkish subordinate officials, who hoped to make use of his interest to their own advantage. According to the common custom in that part of the world, they sent him presents in great numbers. Horses enough were given to him to mount a whole company of cavalry, and not unfrequently also these propitiatory offerings took the form of hard cash. He asserts that any hesitation about accepting these donations would merely have convinced the givers that he thought them too small; and he was therefore obliged to resort to the expedient of dividing them among his servants and employés. These proceedings won for him the honorable distinction of being considered _delih_, which may be translated by the popular expression "cracked." Among other delicate attentions offered to him as a stranger was the infliction of the bastinado upon certain criminals in his presence and with a view to his gratification. Certain Greeks, who were thus made to take a very important part in getting the entertainment to the foreigner _on foot_, were considerately allowed a very liberal reduction in the number of blows they were to receive, which was only twenty-five hundred!

But, in addition to such diversions, Von Moltke's experiences in Turkey included many opportunities to become thoroughly acquainted with the face of the country and the characteristics of the various races inhabiting it. He accompanied the sultan during an extensive tour made by the latter among the Christian provinces, and gives an interesting account of the journey. At another time he was sent to Syria, where the royal forces were operating against Ibrahim Pasha, and here it was that the future great general went through his first campaign. That it ended in a most disastrous defeat for the side upon which he was enlisted does not seem to have been due to any want of energy on his part. Soon after this he gave up his post under the Turkish government and returned to his native land.

W. W. C.

PUNCHING THE DRINKS.

The latest move upon John Barleycorn's works is engineered by the legislative wisdom of the Old Dominion. It consists in a bell-punch on the model, embalmed already in poetry, of the implement which forms the most conspicuous feature of the street-car conductor's outfit. The disappearance of each drink is to be announced to all within hearing by a sprightly peal on a kind of joy-bell Edgar A. Poe lived too soon to include in his tintinnabulatory verses. The chimes vary in intensity and glee according to the magnitude of the event they at once celebrate and record. Lager elicits but a modest jingle, whisky unadorned is honored with a louder greeting, and the arrival of an artistic cobbler at the seat of thirst is the signal for a triple bob-major of the most brilliant vivacity. On a court day, an election day or a circus day the air will vibrate to the incessant and inspiriting clangor; and as in one part or another of the Commonwealth one at least of those festivals so dear to freemen is in blast always, the din will be ended only by midnight, resounding over her whole surface from daylight to the witching hour.

J.B.'s assailants, and their modes of attack, are innumerable. Every foot of his enceinte is scarred with the dint of siege, and from every battlement "the flight of baffled foes" he has "watched along the plain." Sap and storm have alike failed to bring down his rosy colors. Father Mathew, Gough, the Sons of Temperance, the Straight-Outs,--where are they? He stands intact and defiant. Should he surrender, it will be a wondrous triumph, and all the more so for the simplicity of the means. The marvel will be, as with Columbus and the egg, why everybody did not think of it long ago.

The way once opened, all will flock in. Divines, statesmen, moralists and financiers will all strike for the new placer. The moral reformers will brandish aloft the tinkling weapon, enthusiastic in their determination to use it to the utmost and bring down tippling to a minimum. Lawmakers and tax-gatherers will rejoice over a new and fertile source of revenue, and pile upon it impost on impost, secure of the approval of the most grumbling of tax-payers. To the new fiscal and moral California all will flock.

The extent of the revolution is as little to be estimated in advance as was that caused by Columbus's voyage. Strong drink pervades all civilized lands. It is a universal element, the elimination of which must produce changes impossible to be calculated or foreseen. Should the grand moral results anticipated follow, the difference between civilized man and his sober savage fellow will be widened. Progress will no longer be handicapped, and will press forward with accelerated speed. Its path will cease to be strewn with broken fortunes, happiness and bottles. Policemen and criminal courts will lose, according to standard statistics, four-fifths of their occupation. In that proportion the cause of virtue will gain. Mankind will be four hundred per cent. more honest and peaceable than before the passage of the whisky-punch bill. With the public treasury full, and the detective, the juryman and the shyster existent only in a fossil state, the millennium will have been, as the phrase runs, discounted.

But we run foul of the inevitable and inexorable _If_. Is the machine invented that is to do such work? Is it within the reach of any combination of springs, ratchets and clappers? Is the leviathan of strong drink to be hooked after that fashion--a bit put in his mouth and the monster made to draw the car of state? We shall see. The end would justify much more ponderous and hazardous means, and the chance is worth taking. Independent of the general blessing to mankind involved in the punch idea, Virginia proposes in it a special benefit to herself; and that of course is her chief motive. States so very much in debt as she is are not prone to quixotic philanthropy. Should this novel form of taxation assist in paying the interest on her bonds, she will patiently wait for the secondary, if broader, good accruing to the world at large. Men, she argues, who are able to indulge in stimulants are able to pay their debts, and at least their share of the public debt. Each click of the bell proclaims her adoption of this theory, and at the same time her anxiety to find some means of satisfying her creditors. If she can cancel at once her bonds and Barleycorn, so much the better.

E. B.

THE NAUTCH-DANCERS OF INDIA.

The Prince of Wales was severely censured by some of the English journals for dignifying by his presence the nautch-dancing of India. These performances are peculiar to the country and its religion, and constitute so important a part of the marvels of the East that few male travelers at least fail to witness them. Probably the prince saw no good reason why he should forego any of the benefits of sightseeing vouchsafed to the ordinary traveler. Dancing has always been an important feature of the ceremonial worship of most Oriental peoples. Every temple of note in India has attached to it a troop of nautch-dancers. According to Mr. Sellen, the author of _Annotations of the Sacred Writing's of the Hindus_ (London, 1865), these young girls are "early initiated into all the mysteries of their profession. They are instructed in dancing and vocal and instrumental music, their chief employment being to chant the sacred hymns and perform nautches before their god on the recurrence of high festivals." One of the English papers declared that "witnessing the physical contortions of half-nude prostitutes" was hardly a commendable amusement in the future sovereign of Great Britain. But this is hardly just. Vile as the calling of the nautch-women may be--and one of their duties is to raise funds for the aggrandizement of the temple to which they are attached by selling themselves in its courts--it does not degrade like ordinary prostitution where all society shuns and abhors its votary. In India both priest and layman respect the calling of the nautch-girls as one advancing the cause of religion. It is possible, therefore, to see that their moral nature is, in a sense, sustained by self-respect. "Being always women of more or less personal attractions, which are enhanced," says the same author, "by all the seductions of dress, jewels, accomplishments and art, they frequently receive large sums for the favors they grant, and fifty, one hundred, and even two hundred, rupees have been known to be paid to these sirens at one time." Nor is this very much to be wondered at if it be true that they comprise among their number "some of the loveliest women in the world."

M. H.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

The Two Americas: An Account of Sport and Travel, with Notes on Men and Manners, in North and South America. By Major Sir Rose Lambart Price, Bart. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

It would hardly be inferred from such a title that the duodecimo in large print which assumes to discuss the New World is occupied with the diary of a tour in a gunboat from Rio de Janeiro through Magellan's Straits and up the west coast of South America to San Diego, and thence by stage and railway to San Francisco, Salt Lake and Chicago. An exploration of this character could not be exhaustive, and the successors of the gallant major will find an abundance of matter left in the twin continents for much larger books with much smaller titles.

It must be said, in justice to the writer, that the pretentiousness of his book is only skin-deep. It "thunders in the index," but disappears after the front page. He makes no claim to profundity, and is satisfied to be an authority among Nimrods rather than with statesmen and philosophers. The rod and gun suit his hand better than the pen, and he takes not the least trouble to disguise the fact. Style is the very least of his cares: we should almost judge, indeed, that he likes to parade his contempt for it. The pronoun _who_ he constantly applies to animals, from a sheep to a shellfish. Of the Uruguayan thistles he notes: "The abundance of this weed was quite surprising, and consisted chiefly of two kinds." The gentleman of color he invariably mentions as a _nigger_--a word as strange to ears polite in America, and perhaps as natural to them in England, as _nasty_. He plucks at Sir G. Wolseley's laurels won in "licking a few miserable niggers in Ashantee."

But literary vanities can be despised by a man who drops a prong-horned antelope at one thousand and ninety yards; overtakes by swimming, and captures, a turtle in mid-ocean; finishes with a single ball a grizzly _who_ had put to flight the settlers of half a county in Idaho; stalks a guanaco in Patagonia nine feet high to the top of the head; and catches in one day's fishing, "the only day I really worked hard, twenty-seven California salmon, weighing three hundred and twenty-four pounds." The majesty of the facts utterly overshadows any little blemishes in the method of stating them. Truth so grand might well afford to present itself quite naked, as Truth poetically does--much more somewhat defective in the cut of its garments.

Sir Rose Price is a cosmopolitan sportsman, having hunted the jungles of India, the swamps of Eastern Africa and China, the fjelds of Norway, and most other fields of "mimic war." As usual with persons of that taste, he enjoys perfect health, and, like most persons who know that great blessing, he is full of bonhommie and looks on the rosy side of things. Mosquitoes he dislikes: he denounces also the modern Peruvians. But his chief bitterness is reserved for the unhappy gunboat, the Rocket, which took eight months to get him to San Diego, and spent half an hour in turning round. Whether or not that particular segment of England's wooden walls was built in the eclipse, no reader of Sir Rose's book will doubt that she is rigged with curses dark. When he leaves her a cloud seems to be lifted from his soul. Everything thereafter is delightful, if we except the climate of San Francisco, which he abominates as windy and extreme in its daily changes, and the social system which prevails under Brigham Young. The "big trees" transport him; the California stage-drivers are unapproachable in the world; the officers of the United States army treat him with the most assiduous and unvaried courtesy and hospitality; the ladies of both coasts of the United States are unrivaled for beauty; and "the more one sees of America, both of people and country, the better one likes both." He sums up in the following climax: "Should any visit America after reading these lines, let me advise them to pay particular attention to three subjects--_i. e._, canvas-back ducks, terrapin and madeira. This to the uninitiated is a hint worth remembering." The last word, we take it, refers to the wine of that name, which we had thought was still in process of very slow recovery from the eclipse of twenty-five years ago. The major, however, knows wine, and speaks impartially of it. The wines of California he damns unreservedly: the Californians themselves, he says, never drink them.

Sir Rose Price became intimate with the brave and unfortunate Custer. He was to have joined that officer on the expedition which terminated so fatally. His "traps were packed" and he was ready to start, when, as he states it, a singular train of untoward events interposed and saved his scalp. Secretary Belknap was impeached--General Custer was summoned to Washington and gave testimony unfavorable to the accused. General Grant's alleged disgust thereat caused Custer to be deprived of independent command and the power of appointing a staff. Hence _The Two Americas_ and one scalp less at the belt of Sitting Bull.

Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall): An Autobiographical Fragment and Biographical Notes; with Personal Sketches of Contemporaries, Unpublished Lyrics, and Letters of Literary Friends. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

Neither the biographer nor the critic finds it easy to get a good grip on a personal or literary career so little marked by salient features as that of Procter. The lives of few individuals have rolled on more evenly than his did for the round eighty years which made its term. Not of high or of low birth, rich or poor, feeble or vigorous in health, a man of the world or a recluse, ardent or cold in emotions, his figure is strangely wanting in light and shade. As a poet and a thinker his character is equally evasive. His verse can rarely be pronounced decidedly feeble or commonplace, and never lofty or thrilling. He will be remembered by two or three short poems tender in fancy and soft in finish. Inquirers who are tempted by these to explore the rest of his productions will find them readable, but not memorable, and will wonder at learning that a tragedy of Procter's attained a success on the London stage denied to either of Tennyson's.

The poet will go down to posterity under an assumed name, that under which he was almost exclusively known to readers of his own day. Thus buried under an anonym, and gravitating at all points toward mediocrity, it is odd that so much interest should centre in his life and works as we actually find to exist. This interest may be mainly ascribed to his surroundings. Like Rogers, he shines by reflected light. He numbered among his friends or acquaintances, in varied shades of intimacy, almost every celebrity in British literature during two generations. To these were added leading representatives of the fine arts, music and the drama--Mendelssohn, Lawrence, Landseer, Turner, the Kembles, Edmund Kean. It was a notable visiting-list that embraced all the Lake school, Byron, Dickens, Thackeray, the two Lyttons, Scott, Sydney Smith and a number of others as incongruous in time and tenets. Good taste, amiability, the means and disposition to entertain, would have sufficed, with the aid of less of intellectual and imaginative power than Procter possessed, to keep him in good companionship with men like these, who felt the need of a common professional rallying-point in the metropolis. He avoided collision with any of their crotchets and idiosyncrasies. His antipathies were few, and what he had he was generally successful in repressing. De Quincey seems to have been lowest in his estimation. The genial Elia and the fiery Hazlitt divided his especial and lasting attachment.

Procter was always haunted by the very natural impression that he owed to the world some use of the opportunities afforded him for the study of mind and character by such a concourse of leading men. But he failed to make even a move toward the discharge of that task until a short time before the close of his life. The results, slight as they are, form perhaps the most interesting section of the book before us. It embraces short notices of Byron, Rogers, Crabbe, the three chief Lakers, Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, Carlyle, Haydon, Campbell, Moore and a few others. Coleridge, we are told, had a "prodigious amount of miscellaneous reading" always at command, and forgot everything in the pleasure of hearing himself talk when he could secure an audience. Wordsworth's poverty at one period of his life is illustrated by his having been met emerging from a wood with a quantity of hazelnuts which he had gathered to eke out the scanty dinner of his family. Doubtless he had collected finer things than nuts, if less available for material sustenance. Wordsworth, breakfasting with Rogers, excused his being late by saying he had been detained by one of Coleridge's long monologues. He had called so early on Coleridge, he explained, because he was to dine with him that evening. "And," said Rogers, "you wanted to draw the sting out of him beforehand." Campbell was in society cautious, stiff and precise, like much of his verse, but was subject to occasional outbreaks, analogous to the "Battle of the Baltic" and "Ye Mariners of England." Crabbe resembled Moore in his passion for lords. Walter Scott was big, broad, easy and self-poised, like one of his own historical novels. He impressed Procter more than any of the rest as great, and consciously great. Leigh Hunt was "essentially a gentleman;" he "treated all people fairly, yet seldom or never looked up to any one with much respect;" and "his mind was feminine rather than manly, without intending to speak disrespectfully of his intellect."