Part 3

"A beautiful specimen of an alligator's head was here given by Mr. Alexander to Lord Combermere. He was rather a distinguished monster, having carried off at different occasions, six or eight brace of men from an indigo factory in the neighbourhood. A native, who had long laid wait for him, at length succeeded in slaying him with poisoned arrows. One of these notoriously ghaut-frequenting alligators is well nigh as rich a prize to the poor native who is fortunate enough to capture him, as a Spanish galleon is to a British frigate; for on ripping open his stomach, and over-hauling its freight, it is not unfrequently found to contain 'a choice assortment'--as the Calcutta advertisers have it--of gold, silver, or brass bangles and anklets, which have not been so expeditiously digested as their fair owners, victims of the monster's voracity. A little fat Brahminee child, 'farci an ris,' must be a tempting and tender _bonne bouche_ to these river gourmands. Horrific legends such as the above, together with a great deal of valuable advice on the subject, were quite thrown away upon me; for ninety degrees of Fahrenheit, and the enticing blueness of the water generally betrayed me into a plunge every evening during my Gangetic voyage."

Nocturnal Bathing.

"On the occasion of a grand nocturnal bathing ceremony, held at the great tank called the Indra Damân, I went with a party of three or four others to witness the spectacle. The walls surrounding the pool and a cluster of picturesque pavilions in its centre were brilliantly lighted up with hundreds of cheraugs, or small oil-lamps, casting a flickering lustre upon the heads and shoulders of about five hundred men, women, and children, who were ducking and praying, _à corps perdu,_ in the water. As I glanced over the figures nearest to me, I discovered floating among the indifferent bathers two dead bodies, which had either been drowned in the confusion, or had purposely come to die on the edge of the sacred tank; the cool and apathetic survivors taking not the slightest notice of their soulless neighbours."

King John at the Cape.

"The largest house in Simon's Town, and, indeed, the greater part of the town itself, belongs to an Englishman of the name of Osbond, who, however, is more generally known by the dignified title of 'King John.' He was carpenter on board the sixty-gun ship Sceptre, which was wrecked off this coast some yearn ago. Like Juan, he escaped the sea, and like Juan he found a Haidee. Being well-favoured and sharp-witted, he won the heart and the hand of a wealthy Dutch widow, whose dollars he afterwards, in some bold but successful speculations, turned to good account. He is said to have laid out ten thousand pounds on these--to every one but himself--_inhospita littora._ King John is much respected."

Population of Cape Town.

"The variety of nations, and the numerous shades of complexion among the people in the streets of Cape Town, are very striking to a stranger. First may be remarked the substantial Dutchman, with his pretty, smiling, round-faced, and particularly well-dressed daughter: then the knot of 'Qui hi's,' sent to the Cape, per doctor's certificate, to husband their threadbare constitutions, and lavish their rupees: next the obsequious, smirking, money-making China-man, with his poking shoulders, and whip-like pig-tail: then the stout, squat Hottentots--who resemble the Dutch in but one characteristic!--and half castes of every intermediate tint between black and white. These are well relieved and contrasted by the tall, warlike figures and splendid costume of his Majesty's 72nd Highlanders, who, with the 98th regiment, form the garrison of Cape Town."

Visit to the Residence of Napoleon at St. Helena.

"We soon came in sight of the level plateau of the Longwood estate, the residence of the late emperor, and six miles from Plantation House. Here the country gradually assumes a more desolate and a wilder look; and the English visitor arrives at the unfortunate and unwelcome conclusion, that the best part of the island was not given to the illustrious captive. One cannot avoid agreeing with Sir W. Scott, that Plantation House should have been accorded to him, in spite of the detering reasons of its vicinity to the sea, and its sequestered situation. Longwood, however, has better roads, more space for riding or driving, and in summer must have been much cooler than the less sheltered parts of the isle. As we turned through the lodges the old house appeared at the end of an avenue of scrubby and weather-worn trees. It bears the exterior of a respectable farm-house, but is now fast running to decay. On entering a dirty courtyard, and quitting our horses, we were shown by some idlers into a square building, which once contained the bed-room, sitting-room, and bath of the _Empereur des François._ The partitions and floorings are now thrown down, and torn up, and the apartments occupied for six years by the hero before whom kings, emperors, and popes had quailed, are now tenanted by cart-horses!

"Passing on with a groan, I entered a small chamber, with two windows looking towards the north. Between these windows are the marks of a fixed sofa: on that couch Napoleon died. The apartment is now occupied by a threshing machine; 'No bad emblem of its former tenant!' said a sacrilegious wag. Hence we were conducted onwards to a large room, which formerly contained a billiard-table, and whose front looks out upon a little latticed veranda, where the imperial peripatetic--I cannot style him philosopher--enjoyed the luxury of six paces to and fro,--his favourite promenade. The white-washed walls are scored with names of every nation; and the paper of the ceiling has been torn off in strips as holy relics. Many couplets, chiefly French, extolling and lamenting the departed hero, adorn or disfigure (according to their qualities) the plaster walls. The only lines that I can recall to mind--few are worth it--are the following, written ever the door, and signed '---- ----, Officier de la Garde Impériale.'

"'Du grand Napoléon le nom toujours cité Ira de bouche en bouche à la postérité!'"

The writer doubtless possessed more spirit as a sabreur than as a poet.

"The emperor's once well-kept garden,

"'And still where many a garden-flower grows wild,'

"is now overgrown and choked with weeds. At the end of a walk still exists a small mound, on which it is said the hero of Lodi, Marengo, and Austerlitz, amused himself by erecting a mock battery. The little chunamed tank, in which he fed some fresh-water fish, is quite dried up; and the mud wall, through a hole in which he reconnoitered passers-by, is, like the great owner, returned to earth!"

Captain Mundy's volumes are illustrated chiefly with sketches of Indian sports from the master-hand of Land-seer; and for spirit of execution they deserve to rank among the finest productions of this distinguished artist.

* * * * *

RECENT FRENCH LITERATURE.

A novel picture of Paris has lately appeared with the taking title of the _Hundred and One._ Its origin, as well as its subject, is interesting. It is a voluntary association of almost all the literary talent of France, for the benefit of an enterprising bookseller, whose affairs have, it seems, fallen into the sere, since the commercial embarrassments following on the Revolution. A hundred and one authors of all ranks and political opinions, philosophers, academicians, journalists, deputies, poets, artists, have combined in this work to pass in review before us the humours, follies and opinions of the French capital, painted in colours gay or grave, sketchy or elaborate, according to the manner or mood of the artist. A very amusing work, suitable to all tastes, is the result, and, by aid of the _Foreign Quarterly Review_, we are enabled to present the reader with a specimen sketch by Leon Guzlan, an author of some celebrity in this species of writing.[1]

[Footnote 1: Several specimens have been ably translated in the Athenaeum.]

VISIT TO THE MORGUE, AT PARIS.

(The Morgue, we should premise, is an establishment in Paris for the reception of all persons found dead in the City or its environs. Thither it is the duty of the police to convey the bodies, where they are exposed in a hall open to the public for a stated time,[1] when, if not identified, and claimed, they are interred in the neighbouring cemetery.)

[Footnote 1: The bodies are stripped, and placed on sloping slabs of marble; above each are hung the clothes of the deceased.]

"After describing the exterior, the _Salle de l'Exposition_, which is the only portion of the building, of course, with which the public are acquainted, the writer conducts us into the inner recesses of this house of death, the apartments of the superintendant.

"M. Perrin, is a little old man, who coughs incessantly. When I explained to him the object of my visit, he very politely offered to show me all the details of his administration, regretting much, as he said, that there was not so much variety as could be desired. 'But I will show you what I have--be pleased to walk up.'

"As we were climbing the narrow stairs, and he was informing me that his establishment was connected both with the prefecture and the police, with the one on account of the local expenses, with the other from its connexion with the public health, we were obliged to stand close against the wall to allow a troop of young girls to pass, well dressed, gay, but shivering with the cold, which blew from the river through the chink which lighted the stair.

"'These are four of my daughters. I have eight children. François, the keeper, has had four, and he has had the good fortune to get them all married. François is a kind father.'

"'So,' said I, 'twelve children then have been born in the Morgue. Dreams of joy, and conjugal endearments, and parental delights, have been experienced in this chamber of death. Marriage with its orange flowers, baptism with its black robed sponsors, the communion, and the embroidered veil, love, religion, virtue, have had their home here as elsewhere. God has sown the seeds of happiness every where.'

"'Papa, we are going to a distribution of prizes. My sisters are sure to get a prize. Don't weary, we will be back in good time.'

"'Go, my children,'--and all four embraced him.

"I thought of the body of the little Norman in the dreary room beneath, and of the mother who even now, perhaps, was anxiously looking for her from the window.

"'This is the apartment of François'. François did the honours with the activity of a man who is not ashamed of his establishment. His room is comfortably furnished; two modern pendules mounted on bronze, a wardrobe with a Medusa's head, a high bed, and a handsome rose-coloured curtain. If the room was not overburdened with furniture, if there was not much of luxury, yet, to those not early accustomed to superfluities, it might even seem gay. It represented the tastes, opinions, and habits of its master. Vases of flowers threw a green reflection on the curtains, for François is fond of flowers. Among his gallery of portraits were those of Augereau and Kleber, both in long coats, leaning on immense sabres, with peruques and powder. Napoleon is there three times.

"'Look at these jars,' said François, 'these are sweetmeats of my wife's making; she excels in sweetmeats.' I read upon them, 'gooseberries of 1831.' We left François's apartment which forms the right wing of the Morgue, while the clerk's house is on the left, and entered the cabinet of administration of M. Perrin.

"If François is fond of flowers, M. Perrin has the same penchant for hydraulics and the camera obscura; he draws, he makes jets from the Seine, by an ingenious piece of machinery of his own invention; while he was retouching his syphon, I asked permission to turn over the register, where suicides are ranged in two columns.

"The fatal 'unknown' was the prevailing designation; 'brought here at three in the morning, skull fractured, _unknown;_' 'brought at twelve at night, drowned under the Pont des Arts, cards in his pocket, _unknown;_'--'young woman, pregnant, crushed by a fiacre at the corner of the Rue Mandar, _unknown_;'--'new born child found dead of cold, at the gate of an hotel, _unknown.'_

"I said to M. Perrin that he must weary here very much occasionally during the long nights of winter.

"'No,' replied he good humouredly, 'the children sing, we all work, François and I play at draughts or piquet; the worst of it is, we are sometimes interrupted; a knock comes, we must go down, get a stone ready, undress the new comer and register him: that spoils the game; we forget to mark the points.'

"'And this is the way you generally spend your evenings?'--'Always, except when François has to go to Vaugirard at four o'clock: then he must go to bed earlier. Perhaps you do not know that our burying ground is at Vaugirard: as that burying ground is not much in fashion, we have been allowed to retain our privilege of having a fosse to ourselves.'

"'I understand,--it is a fief of the Morgue.'

"'You saw that chariot below near the entrance gate, in which the children were hiding themselves at play,--that is our hearse.'

"'And rich or poor, all must make use of your conveyance? If for instance a suicide is recognised, his relations or friends may reclaim him, take him home, and bestow the rites of sepulture on him at his own house?'

"'No, the Morgue does not give back what has been once deposited here. It allows the funeral ceremonies to be as pompous as they will, but they must all set out from hence; one end of the procession perhaps is at Notre Dame, while the other is starting from the Morgue. The Archbishop of Paris may be there; but François's place is fixed. It is the first.'

"'And the priests of Notre Dame, do they never make any difficulty about administering the funeral rites to your dead?'

"'Never!'

"'Not even to the suicides?'

"'There are no suicides for Notre Dame: one is drowned by accident, another killed by the bursting of a gun, a third has fallen from a scaffold. I invent the excuse, and the conscience of the priest accepts it. That's enough.'

"So, thought I! Notre Dame, which formerly witnessed the execution at the stake of sorcerers, alchymists, and gipsies on the Grande Place, has now no word of reprobation for the carcass of the suicide, once allowed to rot on the ground, or be devoured by birds. She asks not here what was his faith. The priest says mildly, 'Peace be with you.'

"We walked down, and François opened the first room, that which contains the dresses; habits of all shapes, all dimensions, hideously jumbled together; gaiters pinned to a sleeve, a shawl shading the neck of a coat; dresses of peasants, workmen, carters and brewers' frocks, women's gowns, all faded, discoloured, shapeless, flap against each other in the current of air which entered through the windows. There is something here appalling in the sight and sound of these objects, soulless, body-less, yet moving as if they had life, and presenting the form without the flesh. Your eye rests on a handkerchief, the property of some poor labourer, suddenly seized with the idea of suicide, after some day that he has wanted work.

"François, who followed the direction of my eyes to see what impression the picture produced on me sighed heavily.

"'Does it move you too,' said I? 'Are you discontented with your lot.--Unhappy?'

"'Not exactly! But, Sir, formerly, you must know, the dresses, after being six months exhibited, became a perquisite of ours; we sold them. Now they talk of taking the dresses from us.'

"I reassured François as to the intention of government, and assured him there was no talk of taking away the dresses.

"The second room, that which adjoins the public exhibition room, is appropriated for the dissection of those, the mode of whose death appears to the police to be suspicious. Its only furniture is a marble table, on which the dissections take place, and a shelf on which are placed several bottles of chlorate. This room is immediately above the room of M. Perrin. The dissecting table above just answers to the girls' piano below.

"In this room, which I crossed rapidly to avoid as much as possible the sight of a body extended on the plank, I saw the little girl, who had been stifled the night before in the diligence; she was a lovely child. The other figure was frightfully disfigured; scarcely even would his mother have recognised him.

"There remained only the public room; it is narrow, ill aired; ten or twelve black and sloping stones receive the suicides, who are placed on it almost in a state of nudity; the places are seldom all occupied, except perhaps during a revolution. Then it is that the Morgue is recruited; two more days of glory and immortality in July, and the plague had been in Paris.

"'It is true,' said M. Perrin, 'we worked hard during the three days, and we were allowed the use of two assistants. Corpses every where, within, without, at the gate, on the bank.'--

"'And your girls?'

"'During these days they did not leave their apartment, nor looked out to the street, nor to the river; besides, you are mistaken if you think the spectacle would have terrified them. Brought up here, they will walk at night without a light in front of the glass, which divides the corpses from the public, without trembling; we become accustomed to any thing.'

"Methought I heard the poor children, so familiar with the idea of death, so accustomed to this domestic spectacle of their existence, asking innocently of the strangers whom they visited,--as one would ask where is your garden, your kitchen, or your cabinet,--'where do _you_ keep your dead here?'

"These were all the facts I could gather with regard to the establishment. I was opening the glass door to breathe the fresh air again, when the entrance of the crowd drove me back into the interior; they were following a bier, on which lay a body, from which the water dripped in a long stream. From one of the hands which were closely clenched, the keeper detached a strip of coloured linen, and a fragment of lace. 'Ah!' said he, 'let me look, 'tis she!'

"'Who is it?'

"'The nurse who was here this morning; the nurse of the little Norman girl. Good! they may be buried together.' And M. Perrin put on his spectacles, opened his register, and wrote in his best current-hand--_unknown!_"

* * * * *

POETRY.

* * * * *

The Maid of Elvar. By Allan Cunningham.

This is one of the most gratifying "appearances" in the literature of the day. It reminds us that however the poet's harp may have remained unstrung, it has not lost its vigour or sweetness--its depth of feeling, or its melody of tone, and these too are ably sustained through nearly 600 stanzas in an exquisitely embellished narrative. The poem is "a song of other times;" the story is one of chivalrous love; the hero is a young warrior and poet; the Maid of Elvar offers a garland of gold for the best song in honour of one of his victories; "minstrels meet and sing, but the song of Eustace, though on another theme, is reckoned the best; the Maid hangs the gold chain round his neck, and retires, admiring the young stranger;" and thereby hangs the tale. As our limits will not allow us to detach a scene or incident, we must be content, for the present, with culling a few of the choicest flowers of the song.

CIVIL WAR.

Woe, woe was ours. Chief drew his sword on chief: Religion with her relique and her brand, Made strife between our bosom-bones, and grief And lawless joy abounded in the land; Our glass of glory sank nigh its last sand; Rank with its treason, priesthood with its craft, Turned Scotland's war-lance to a willow-wand. But war arose in Scotland--civil war; Serf warred with chief, and father warred with son, The church too warred with all: her evil star That rules o'er sinking realms shone like the sun-- Her lights waxed dim and died out one by one-- Woe o'er the land hung like a funeral pall: The sword the bold could brave, the coward shun, But famine followed fast and fell on all-- Pale lips cried oft for food which came not at their call.

RURAL PEACE.

Much mirth was theirs--war was no wonder then; Dread fled with danger, and the cottage cocks, The shepherd's war-pipe, called the sons of men When morning's wheel threw bright dew from its spokes, To pastures green to lead again their flocks; The horn of harvest followed with its call; Fast moved the sickle, and swift rose the shocks, Behind the reapers like a golden wall-- Gravely the farmer smiled, by turns approving all.

The ripe corn waved in lone Dalgonar glen, That, with its bosom basking in the sun, Lies like a bird; the hum of working men Joins with the sound of streams that southward run, With fragrant holms atween: then mix in one Beside a church, and round two ancient towers Form a deep fosse. Here sire is heired by son, And war comes never; ancle deep in flowers In summer walk its dames among the sunny bowers.

He rose, find homeward by the slumbering stream Walked with the morn-dew glistening on his shoon. The sun was up, and his outbursting beam Touched tower and tree and pasture hills aboon; The stars were quenched, and vanished was the moon; Loud lowed the herds and the glad partridge' cry Made corn-fields musical as groves at noon; Birds left the perch, bee following bee hummed by, And gladness reigned on earth and brightness claimed the sky.

MINSTRELSY.

I sing of days in which brave deeds of arms And deeds of song went hand in hand: our kings Heroic feelings had and owned the charms Of minstrel lore--they loved the magic strings More than the sceptre; still their kingdom rings With their gay musings and their harpings high. To noble deeds fair poesie lends wings; She lifts them up from grovelling earth to sky, And bids them sit in light, and live and never die.

FAME.

Fame, fame--thou warrior's wish, thou poet's thought, Thou bright delusion; like the rainbow thou Glitterest, yet none may touch thee; thing of naught, Star-high with heaven's own brightness on thy brow, Blazoned and glorious I beheld thee grow-- Vision, begone,--for I am none of thine. Of all that fills my heart and fancy now, From dull oblivion not one word or line Wilt thou touch with thy light and render it divine.

Even be it so. I sing not for thy smiles-- I sing to keep down sighs and ease the smart Of care and sadness, and the daily toils Which crush my soul and trample on my heart. Far mightier spirits of the inspired art Are mute and nameless, mid the muse in grief Calls from the eastern to the western airt, On tale, tradition, ballad, song, and chief On thee, to give their names one passage bright and brief. She calls in vain; like to a shooting star Their storied rhymes shone brightly in their birth, And shot a dazzling lustre near and far; Then darkened, died, as all things else on earth.

EVENING.