BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCXCIV.         AUGUST, 1848.         Vol. LXIV.

CONTENTS.

EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET;
AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed.
SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

[129]

LIFE IN THE “FAR WEST.”

PART III.

La Bonté and his companions proceeded
up the river, the Black Hills
on their left hand, from which several
small creeks or feeders swell the waters
of the North Fork. Along these they
hunted unsuccessfully for beaver “sign,”
and it was evident that the spring
hunt had almost entirely exterminated
the animal from this vicinity. Following
Deer Creek to the ridge of the
Black Hills, they crossed the mountain
on to the waters of the Medicine
Bow, and here they discovered a few
lodges, and La Bonté set his first trap.
He and old Luke finding “cuttings”
near the camp, followed the “sign”
along the bank until the practised eye
of the latter discovered a “slide,”
where the beaver had ascended the
bank to chop the trunk of a cotton
wood, and convey the bark to its lodge.
Taking a trap from “sack,” the old
hunter after “setting” the “trigger,”
placed it carefully under the water,
where the “slide” entered the stream,
securing the chain to the stem of a
sappling on the bank; while a stick,
also attached to the trap by a thong,
floated down the stream, to mark the
position of the trap, should the animal
carry it away. A little farther on,
and near another “run,” three traps
were set; and over these Luke placed
a little stick, which he first dipped into
a mysterious-looking phial which contained
his “medicine.”[1]

The next morning they visited the
traps, and had the satisfaction of finding
three fine beaver secured in the
first three they visited, and the fourth,
which had been carried away, they
discovered by the floatstick, a little
distance down the stream, with a large
drowned beaver between its teeth.

The animals being carefully skinned,
they returned to camp with the choicest
portions of the meat, and the tails, on
which they most luxuriously supped;
and La Bonté was fain to confess that
all his ideas of the superexcellence of
buffalo were thrown in the shade by
the delicious beaver tail, the rich meat
of which he was compelled to allow
was “great eating,” unsurpassed by
“tender loin” or “boudin,” or other
meat of whatever kind he had eaten
of before.

The country where La Bonté and
his companions were trapping, is very
curiously situated in the extensive bend
of the Platte which encloses the Black
Hill range on the north, and which
bounds the large expanse of broken
tract known as the Laramie Plains,
their southern limit being the base of
the Medicine Bow Mountains. From
the north-western corner of the bend,
an inconsiderable range extends to the
westward, gradually decreasing in
height until they reach an elevated
plain, which forms a break in the stupendous
chain of the Rocky Mountains,
and affords their easy passage,
now known as the Great, or South
Pass. So gradual is the ascent of this
portion of the mountain, that the traveller
can scarcely believe that he is
crossing the dividing ridge between
the waters which flow into the Atlantic
and Pacific Oceans, and in a few[130]
minutes can fling a stick into two
neighbouring streams, one of which
would be carried thousands of miles,
which the eastern waters traverse in
their course to the Gulf of Mexico, the
other, borne a lesser distance, to the
Gulf of California.

The country is frequented by the
Crows and Snakes, who are at perpetual
war with the Shians and Sioux, following
them often far down the Platte,
where many bloody battles have taken
place. The Crows are esteemed friendly
to the whites; but when on war expeditions,
and “hair” their object, it is
always dangerous to fall in with Indian
war-parties, and particularly in
the remote regions of the mountains,
where they do not anticipate retaliation.

Trapping with tolerable success in
this vicinity, as soon as the premonitory
storms of approaching winter
warned them to leave the mountains,
they crossed over to the waters of
Green River, one of the affluents of
the Colorado, intending to winter at
a rendezvous to be held in “Brown’s
Hole”—an enclosed valley so called,
which, abounding in game, and sheltered
on every side by lofty mountains,
is a favourite wintering-ground of the
mountaineers. Here they found several
trapping bands already arrived; and
a trader from the Uintah country, with
store of powder, lead, and tobacco,
prepared to ease them of their hardly
earned peltries.

In bands numbering from two to
ten, and singly, the trappers dropped
into the rendezvous; some with many
pack-loads of beaver, others with
greater or less quantity, and more than
one came in on foot, having lost his
animals and peltry by Indian thieving.
Here were soon congregated many
mountaineers, whose names are famous
in the history of the Far West.
Fitzpatrick and Hatcher, and old Bill
Williams, with their bands, well-known
leaders of trapping parties, soon arrived.
Sublette came in with his men
from Yellow Stone, and many of
Wyeth’s New Englanders were there.
Chábonard with his half-breeds, Wahkeitchas
all, brought his peltries from
the lower country; and half-a-dozen
Shawanee and Delaware Indians, with
a Mexican from Taos, one Marcellin,
a fine strapping fellow, the best trapper
and hunter in the mountains, and
ever first in the fight. Here, too,
arrived the “Bourgeois” traders of the
“North West”[2] Company, with their
superior equipments, ready to meet
their trappers, and purchase the beaver
at an equitable value; and soon the
encampment began to assume a busy
appearance when the trade opened.

A curious assemblage did the rendezvous
present, and representatives
of many a land met there. A son of
La belle France here lit his pipe from
one proffered by a native of New
Mexico. An Englishman and a Sandwich
islander cut a quid from the
same plug of tobacco. A Swede and
an “old Virginian” puffed together.
A Shawanee blew a peaceful cloud
with a scion of the “Six Nations.”
One from the Land of Cakes—a canny
chiel—sought to “get round” (in
trade) a right “smart” Yankee, but
couldn’t “shine.”

The beaver went briskly, six dollars
being the price paid per lb. in
goods—for money is seldom given in
the mountain market, where “beaver”
is cash for which the articles supplied
by the traders are bartered. In a very
short time peltries of every description
had changed hands, either by trade, or
gambling with cards and betting. With
the mountain men bets decide every
question that is raised, even the most
trivial; and if the Editor of Bell’s Life
was to pay one of these rendezvous
a winter visit, he would find the broad
sheet of his paper hardly capacious
enough to answer all the questions which
would be referred to his decision.

Before the winter was over, La
Bonté had lost all traces of civilised
humanity, and might justly claim to
be considered as “hard a case” as
any of the mountaineers then present.
Long before the spring opened, he had
lost all the produce of his hunt and
both his animals, which, however, by
a stroke of luck, he recovered, and
wisely “held on to” for the future.
Right glad when spring appeared,
he started from Brown’s Hole, with
four companions, to hunt the Uintah
or Snake country, and the affluents
of the larger streams which rise in[131]
that region and fall into the Gulf of
California.

In the valley of the Bear River
they found beaver abundant, and
trapped their way westward until
they came upon the famed locality of
the Beer and Soda Springs—natural
fountains of mineral water, renowned
amongst the trappers as being “medicine”
of the first order.

Arriving one evening, about sundown,
at the Beer Spring, they found
a solitary trapper sitting over the
rocky basin, intently regarding, and
with no little awe, the curious phenomenon
of the bubbling gas. Behind
him were piled his saddles and a pack
of skins, and at a little distance a
hobbled Indian pony was feeding
amongst the cedars which formed a
little grove round the spring. As the
three hunters dismounted from their
animals, the lone trapper scarcely
noticed their arrival, his eyes being
still intently fixed upon the water.
Looking round at last, he was instantly
recognised by one of La Bonté’s
companions, and saluted as “Old
Rube.” Dressed from head to foot in
buckskin, his face, neck, and hands appeared
to be of the same leathery texture,
so nearly did they assimilate in
colour to the materials of his dress.
He was at least six feet two or three
in his mocassins, straight-limbed and
wiry, with long arms ending in hands
of tremendous grasp, and a quantity
of straight black hair hanging on his
shoulders. His features, which were
undeniably good, wore an expression
of comical gravity, never relaxing into
a smile, which a broad good-humoured
mouth could have grinned from ear to
ear.

“What, boys,” he said, “will
you be simple enough to camp here,
alongside these springs? Nothing
good ever came of sleeping here, I tell
you, and the worst kind of devils are
in those dancing waters.”

“Why, old hos,” cried La Bonté,
“what brings you hyar then, and
camp at that?”

“This niggur,” answered Rube
solemnly, “has been down’d upon a
sight too often to be skeared by what
can come out from them waters; and
thar arn’t a devil as hisses thar, as
can ‘shine’ with this child, I tell you.
I’ve tried him onest, an’ fout him to
clawin’ away to Eustis,[3] and if I
draws my knife agin on such varmint,
I’ll raise his hair, as sure as shootin’.”

Spite of the reputed dangers of the locality,
the trappers camped on the spot,
and many a draught of the delicious
sparkling water they quaffed in honour
of the “medicine” of the fount. Rube,
however, sat sulky and silent, his huge
form bending over his legs, which
were crossed, Indian fashion, under
him, and his long bony fingers spread
over the fire, which had been made
handy to the spring. At last they
elicited from him that he had sought
this spot for the purpose of “making
medicine,” having been persecuted by
extraordinary ill luck, even at this
early period of his hunt,—the Indians
having stolen two out of his three animals,
and three of his half-dozen
traps. He had, therefore, sought the
springs for the purpose of invoking
the fountain spirits, which, a perfect
Indian in his simple heart, he implicitly
believed to inhabit their mysterious
waters. When the others
had, as he thought, fallen asleep, La
Bonté observed the ill-starred trapper
take from his pouch a curiously carved
red stone pipe, which he carefully
charged with tobacco and kinnik-kinnik.
Then approaching the spring, he
walked three times round it, and
gravely sat himself down. Striking
fire with his flint and steel, he lit his
pipe, and, bending the stem three
several times towards the water, he
inhaled a vast quantity of smoke, and,
bending back his neck and looking
upwards, puffed it into the air. He
then blew another puff towards the
four points of the compass, and
emptying the pipe into his hand, cast
the consecrated contents into the
spring, saying a few Indian “medicine”
words of cabalistic import. Having
performed the ceremony to his satisfaction,
he returned to the fire, smoked
a pipe on his own hook, and turned
into his buffalo robe, conscious of having
done a most important duty.

In the course of their trapping expedition,
and accompanied by Rube, who
knew the country well, they passed
near the vicinity of the Great Salt Lake,[132]
a vast inland sea, whose salitrose
waters cover an extent of upwards of
one hundred and forty miles in length,
by eighty in breadth. Fed by several
streams, of which the Big Bear River
is the most considerable, this lake
presents the curious phenomenon of a
vast body of water without any
known outlet. According to the
trappers, an island, from which rises
a chain of lofty mountains, nearly divides
the north-western portion of the
lake, whilst a smaller one, within
twelve miles of the northern shore,
rises six hundred feet from the level
of the water. Rube declared to his
companions that the larger island was
known by the Indians to be inhabited
by a race of giants, with whom no
communication had ever been held by
mortal man; and but for the casual
wafting to the shores of the lake of
logs of gigantic trees, cut by axes of
extraordinary size, the world would
never have known that such a people
existed. They were, moreover, white,
as themselves, and lived upon corn
and fruits, and rode on elephants, &c.

Whilst following a small creek at
the south-west extremity of the lake,
they came upon a band of miserable
Indians, who, from the fact of their
subsisting chiefly on roots, are called
the Diggers. At first sight of the
whites, they immediately fled from
their wretched huts, and made towards
the mountain; but one of the trappers,
galloping up on his horse, cut off their
retreat, and drove them like sheep
before him back to their village. A
few of these wretched creatures came
into camp at sundown, and were regaled,
with such meat as the larder afforded.
They appeared to have no other
food in their village but bags of dried
ants and their larvæ, and a few roots
of the yampah. Their huts were constructed
of a few bushes of grease-wood,
piled up as a sort of breakwind, in
which they huddled in their filthy
skins. During the night, they crawled
up to the camp and stole two of the
horses, and the next morning not a
sign of them was visible. Now La
Bonté witnessed a case of mountain
law, and the practical effects of the
“lex talionis” of the Far West.

The trail of the runaway Diggers
bore to the north-west, or along the
skirt of a barren waterless desert,
which stretches far away from the
southern shores of the Salt Lake to the
borders of Upper California. La
Bonté, with three others, determined
to follow the thieves, recover their animals,
and then rejoin the other two
(Luke and Rube) on a creek two
days’ journey from their present camp.
Starting at sunrise, they rode on at a
rapid pace all day, closely following
the trail, which led directly to the
north-west, through a wretched sandy
country, without game or water.
From the appearance of the track, the
Indians must still have been several
hours ahead of them, when the fatigue
of their horses, suffering from want of
grass and water, compelled them to
camp near the head of a small water-course,
where they luckily found a
hole containing a little water, and
whence a broad Indian trail passed,
apparently frequently used. Long
before daylight they were again in
the saddle, and, after proceeding a few
miles, saw the lights of several fires a
short distance ahead of them. Halting
here, one of the party advanced on
foot to reconnoitre, and presently returned
with the intelligence that the
party they were in pursuit of had joined
a village numbering thirty or forty huts.

Loosening their girths, they permitted
their tired animals to feed on
the scanty herbage which presented
itself, whilst they refreshed themselves
with a pipe of tobacco—for they had
no meat of any description with them,
and the country afforded no game.
As the first streak of dawn appeared
in the east, they mounted their horses,
after first examining their rifles, and
moved cautiously towards the Indian
village. As it was scarcely light
enough for their operations, they
waited behind a sandhill in the vicinity,
until objects became more distinct,
and then, emerging from their cover
with loud war-whoops, they charged
abreast into the midst of the village.

As the frightened Indians were
scarcely risen from their beds, no
opposition was given to the daring
mountaineers, who, rushing upon the
flying crowd, discharged their rifles at
close quarters, and then, springing
from their horses, attacked them knife
in hand, and only ceased the work of
butchery when nine Indians lay dead
upon the ground. All this time the
women, half dead with fright, were
huddled together on the ground, howling[133]
piteously; and the mountaineers
advancing to them, whirled their lassos
round their heads, and throwing the
open nooses into the midst, hauled
out three of them, and securing their
arms in the rope, bound them to a
tree, and then proceeded to scalp the
dead bodies. Whilst they were engaged
in this work, an old Indian,
withered and grisly, and hardly bigger
than an ape, suddenly emerged from
a rock, holding in his left hand a bow
and a handful of arrows, whilst one
was already drawn to the head. Running
towards them, and almost before
the hunters were aware of his presence,
he discharged an arrow at a few
yards’ distance, which buried itself in
the ground not a foot from La Bonté’s
head as he bent over the body of the
Indian he was scalping; and hardly
had the whiz ceased, when whirr flew
another, striking him in his right
shoulder. Before the Indian could
fit a third arrow to his bow, La Bonté
sprang upon him, seized him by the
middle, and spinning the pigmy form
of the Indian round his head, as easily
as he would have twirled a tomahawk,
he threw him with tremendous force
on the ground at the feet of one of
his companions, who, stooping down,
coolly thrust his knife into the Indian’s
breast, and quickly tore off his scalp.

The slaughter over, without casting
an eye to the captive squaws, the
trappers proceeded to search the village
for food, of which they stood much
in need. Nothing, however, was found
but a few bags of dried ants, which,
after eating voraciously of, but with
wry mouths, they threw aside, saying
the food was worse than “poor bull.”
They found, however, the animals
they had been robbed of, and two
more besides,—wretched half-starved
creatures; and on these mounting
their captives, they hurried away on
their journey back to their companions,
the distance being computed at three
days’ travel from their present position.
However, they thought, by taking
a more direct course, they might
find better pasture for their animals,
and water, besides saving at least half
a day by the short cut. To their cost,
they proved the truth of the old saying,
that “a short cut is always a
long road,” as will be presently shown.

It has been said that from the south-western
extremity of the Great Salt
Lake a vast desert extends for
hundreds of miles, unbroken by the
slightest vegetation, destitute of game
and water, and presenting a cheerless
expanse of sandy plain, or rugged
mountain, thinly covered with dwarf
pine or cedar, the only evidence of
vegetable life. Into this desert, ignorant
of the country, the trappers struck,
intending to make their short cut;
and, travelling on all day, were compelled
to camp at night, without water
or pasture for their exhausted animals,
and themselves ravenous with hunger
and parched with thirst. The next
day three of their animals “gave out,”
and they were fain to leave them behind;
but imagining that they must
soon strike a creek, they pushed on
until noon, but still no water presented
itself, nor a sign of game of any description.
The animals were nearly
exhausted, and a horse which could
scarcely keep up with the slow pace
of the others was killed, and its blood
greedily drunk; a portion of the flesh
being eaten raw, and a supply carried
with them for future emergencies.

The next morning two of the horses
lay dead at their pickets, and one only
remained, and this in such a miserable
state that it could not possibly have
travelled six miles further. It was,
therefore, killed, and its blood drunk,
of which, however, the captive squaws
refused to partake. The men began
to feel the effects of their consuming
thirst, which the hot horse’s blood
only served to increase; their lips became
parched and swollen, their eyes
bloodshot, and a giddy sickness seized
them at intervals. About mid-day
they came in sight of a mountain on
their right hand, which appeared to be
more thickly clothed with vegetation;
and arguing from this that water
would be found there, they left their
course and made towards it, although
some eight or ten miles distant. On
arriving at the base, the most minute
search failed to discover the slightest
traces of water, and the vegetation
merely consisted of dwarf piñon and
cedar. With their sufferings increased
by the exertions they had used in
reaching the mountain, they once
more sought the trail, but every step
told on their exhausted frames. The
sun was very powerful, the sand over
which they were floundering deep and
heavy, and, to complete their sufferings,[134]
a high wind was blowing it in
their faces, filling their mouths and
noses with its searching particles.

Still they struggled onwards manfully,
and not a murmur was heard
until their hunger had entered the
second stage attendant upon starvation.
They had now been three days
without food, and three without water;
under which privation nature can
hardly sustain herself for a much
longer period. On the fourth morning,
the men looked wolfish, their captives
following behind in sullen and perfect
indifference, occasionally stooping
down to catch a beetle if one presented
itself, and greedily devouring it. A
man named Forey, a Canadian half-breed,
was the first to complain. “If
this lasted another sundown,” he said,
“some of them would be ‘rubbed out;’
that meat had to be ‘raised’ anyhow;
and for his part, he knew where to
look for a feed, if no game was seen
before they put out of camp on the
morrow; and meat was meat, anyhow
they fixed it.”

No answer was made to this, though
his companions well understood him:
their natures as yet revolted against the
last expedient. As for the three squaws,
all of them young girls, they followed
behind their captors without a word of
complaint, and with the stoical indifference
to pain and suffering, which alike
characterises the haughty Delaware of
the north and the miserable stunted
Digger of the deserts of the Far West.
On the morning of the fifth day, the
party were sitting round a small fire
of piñon, hardly able to rise and commence
their journey, the squaws
squatting over another at a little distance,
when Forey commenced again
to suggest that, if nothing offered, they
must either take the alternative of
starving to death, for they could not
hope to last another day, or have
recourse to the revolting extremity of
sacrificing one of the party to save the
lives of all. To this, however, there
was a murmur of dissent, and it was
finally resolved that all should sally
out and hunt; for a deer-track had
been discovered near the camp, which,
although it was not a fresh one, proved
that there must be game in the vicinity.
Weak and exhausted as they
were, they took their rifles and started
for the neighbouring uplands, each
taking a different direction.

It was nearly sunset when La
Bonté returned to the camp, where he
already espied one of his companions
engaged in cooking something over it.
Hurrying to the spot, overjoyed with
the anticipations of a feast, he observed
that the squaws were gone;
but, at the same time, thought it was
not improbable they had escaped
during their absence. Approaching
the fire, he observed Forey broiling
some meat on the embers, whilst at a
little distance lay what he fancied was
the carcass of a deer.

“Hurrah, boy!” he exclaimed, as
he drew near the fire. “You’ve ‘made’
a ‘raise,’ I see.”

“Well, I have,” rejoined the other,
turning his meat with the point of his
butcher knife. “There’s the meat,
hos—help yourself.”

La Bonté drew the knife from his
scabbard, and approached the spot his
companion was pointing to; but what
was his horror to see the yet quivering
body of one of the Indian squaws, with
a large portion of the flesh butchered
from it, and part of which Forey was
already greedily devouring. The knife
dropped from his hand, and his heart
rose to his throat.

The next day he and his companion
struck the creek where Rube and the
other trapper had agreed to await
them, and whom they found in camp
with plenty of meat, and about
to start again on their hunt, having
given up the others for lost. From
the day they parted, nothing was ever
heard of La Bonté’s two companions,
who doubtless fell a prey to utter exhaustion,
and were unable to return
to the camp. And thus ended the
Digger expedition.

It may appear almost incredible
that men having civilised blood in
their veins could perpetrate such wanton
and cold-blooded acts of aggression
on the wretched Indians, as that detailed
above; but it is fact that the
mountaineers never lose an opportunity
of slaughtering these miserable
Diggers, and attacking their villages,
often for the purpose of capturing
women, whom they carry of, and not
unfrequently sell to other tribes, or to
each other. In these attacks neither
sex nor age is spared; and your
mountaineer has as little compunction
in taking the life of an Indian woman,
as he would have in sending his rifle-ball[135]
through the brain of a Crow or
Blackfoot warrior.

La Bonté now found himself without
animals, and fairly “afoot;” consequently
nothing remained for him
but to seek some of the trapping bands,
and hire himself for the hunt. Luckily
for him, he soon fell in with Roubideau,
on his way to Uintah, and was
supplied by him with a couple of
animals; and thus equipped, started
again with a large band of trappers,
who were going to hunt on the waters
of Grand River and the Gila. Here
they fell in with another nation of
Indians, from which branch out the
innumerable tribes inhabiting Northern
Mexico and part of California.
They were in general friendly, but lost
no opportunity of stealing horses or
any articles left lying about the camp.
On one occasion, being camped on a
northern affluent of the Gila, as they
sat round the camp-fires, a volley of
arrows was discharged amongst them,
severely wounding one or two of the
party. The attack, however, was not
renewed, and the next day the camp
was moved further down the stream,
where beaver was tolerably abundant.
Before sundown a number of Indians
made their appearance, and making
signs of peace, were admitted into the
camp.

The trappers were all sitting at their
suppers over the fires, the Indians
looking gravely on, when it was remarked
that now would be a good opportunity
to retaliate upon them for
the trouble their incessant attacks had
entailed upon the camp. The suggestion
was highly approved of, and instantly
acted upon. Springing to their
feet, the trappers seized their rifles,
and commenced the slaughter. The
Indians, panic-struck, fled without
resistance, and numbers fell before the
death-dealing rifles of the mountaineers.
A chief, who had been sitting
on a rock near the fire where the
leader of the trappers sat, had been
singled out by the latter as the first
mark for his rifle.

Placing the muzzle to his heart, he
pulled the trigger, but the Indian,
with extraordinary tenacity of life,
rose and grappled with his assailant.
The white was a tall powerful man,
but, notwithstanding the deadly
wound the Indian had received, he
had his equal in strength to contend
against. The naked form of the Indian
twisted and writhed in his grasp, as
he sought to avoid the trapper’s uplifted
knife. Many of the latter’s
companions advanced to administer
the coup-de-grâce to the savage, but
the trapper cried to them to keep off:
“If he couldn’t whip the Injun,” he
said, “he’d go under.”

At length he succeeded in throwing
him, and, plunging his knife no less
than seven times into his body, tore
off his scalp, and went in pursuit of
the flying savages. In the course of
an hour or two, all the party returned,
and sitting by the fires, resumed their
suppers, which had been interrupted
in the manner just described. Walker,
the captain of the band, sat down by
the fire where he had been engaged in
the struggle with the Indian chief,
whose body was lying within a few
paces of it. He was in the act of
fighting the battle over again to one
of his companions, and was saying
that the Indian had as much life in
him as a buffalo bull, when, to the
horror of all present, the savage, who
had received wounds sufficient for
twenty deaths, suddenly rose to a
sitting posture, the fire shedding a
glowing light upon the horrid spectacle.
The face was a mass of clotted blood,
which flowed from the lacerated and
naked scalp, whilst gouts of blood
streamed from eight gaping wounds in
the naked breast.

Slowly this frightful figure rose to a
sitting posture, and, bending slowly
forward to the fire, the mouth was
seen to open wide, and a hollow gurgling—owg-h-h—broke
from it.

“H——!”, exclaimed the trapper—and
jumping up, he placed a pistol to the
ghastly head, the eyes of which sternly
fixed themselves on his, and pulling
the trigger, blew the poor wretch’s
head to atoms.

The Gila passes through a barren,
sandy country, with but little game,
and sparsely inhabited by several different
tribes of the great nation of the
Apache. Unlike the rivers of this
western region, this stream is, in most
parts of its course, particularly towards
its upper waters, entirely bare
of timber, and the bottom, through
which it runs, affords but little of the
coarsest grass. Whilst on this stream,
the trapping party lost several animals
from the want of pasture, and many[136]
more from the predatory attacks of the
cunning Indians. These losses, however,
they invariably made good
whenever they encountered a native
village—taking care, moreover, to repay
themselves with interest whenever
occasion offered.

Notwithstanding the sterile nature
of the country, the trappers, during
their passage up the Gila, saw with
astonishment that the arid and barren
valley had once been peopled by a
race of men far superior to the present
nomade tribes who roam over it.
With no little awe they gazed upon
the ruined walls of large cities, and
the remains of houses, with their ponderous
beams and joists, still testifying
to the skill and industry with which
they were constructed: huge ditches
and irrigating canals, now filled with
rank vegetation, furrowed the plains
in the vicinity, marking the spot
where once the green waving maize
and smiling gardens covered what now
was a bare and sandy desert. Pieces
of broken pottery, of domestic utensils,
stained with bright colours, every
where strewed the ground; and spear
and arrow-heads of stone, and quaintly
carved idols, and women’s ornaments
of agate and obsidian, were picked up
often by the wondering trappers, examined
with child-like curiosity, and
thrown carelessly aside.[4]

A Taos Indian, who was amongst
the band, was evidently impressed
with a melancholy awe, as he regarded
these ancient monuments of his fallen
people. At midnight he rose from his
blanket and left the camp, which was
in the vicinity of the ruined city,
stealthily picking his way through the
line of slumbering forms which lay
around; and the watchful sentinel observed
him approach the ruins with a
slow and reverential gait. Entering
the mouldering walls, he gazed silently
around, where in ages past his ancestors
trod proudly, a civilised race, the
tradition of which, well known to his
people, served but to make their present
degraded position more galling
and apparent. Cowering under the
shadow of a crumbling wall, the Indian
drew his blanket over his head, and
conjured to his mind’s eye the former
power and grandeur of his race,—that
warlike people who, forsaking their
own country for causes of which not
the most dim tradition affords a trace,
sought in the fruitful and teeming
valleys of the south for a soil and climate
which their own lands did not
afford; and displacing the wild and
barbarous hordes which inhabited the
land, raised there a mighty empire,
great in riches and civilisation, of which
but the vague tradition now remains.

The Indian bowed his head and
mourned the fallen greatness of his
tribe. Rising, he slowly drew his tattered
blanket round his body, and was
preparing to leave the spot, when the
shadow of a moving figure, creeping
past a gap in the ruined wall, through
which the moonbeams were playing,
suddenly arrested his attention. Rigid
as a statue, he stood transfixed to the
spot, thinking a former inhabitant of
the city was visiting, in a ghostly form,
the scenes his body once knew so well.
The bow in his right hand shook with
fear as he saw the shadow approach,
but was as tightly and steadily grasped
when, on the figure emerging from the
shade of the wall, he distinguished the
form of a naked Apache, armed with
bow and arrow, crawling stealthily
through the gloomy ruins.

Standing undiscovered within the
shadow of the wall, the Taos raised
his bow, and drew an arrow to the
head, until the other, who was bending
low to keep under cover of the
wall, and thus approach the sentinel,
standing at a short distance, seeing
suddenly the well-defined shadow on
the ground, rose upright on his legs,
and, knowing escape was impossible,
threw his arms down his sides, and,
drawing himself erect, exclaimed, in a
suppressed tone, “Wa-g-h!”

“Wagh!” exclaimed the Taos likewise,
but quickly dropped his arrow
point, and eased the bow.

“What does my brother want,” he
asked, “that he lopes like a wolf
round the fires of the white hunters?”

“Is my brother’s skin not red?”
returned the Apache, “and yet he
asks a question that needs no answer.[137]
Why does the ‘medicine wolf’ follow
the buffalo and deer! For blood—and
for blood the Indian follows the treacherous
white from camp to camp, to
strike blow for blow, until the deaths
of those so basely killed are fully
avenged.”

“My brother speaks with a big
heart, and his words are true; and
though the Taos and Pimo (Apache)
black their faces towards each other,
(are at war,) here, on the graves of
their common fathers, there is peace
between them. Let my brother go.”

The Apache moved quickly away,
and the Taos once more sought the
camp-fires of his white companions.

Following the course of the Gila to
the eastward, they crossed a range of
the Sierra Madre, which is a continuation
of the Rocky Mountains, and
struck the waters of the Rio del Norte,
below the settlements of New Mexico.
On this stream they fared well; besides
trapping a great quantity of
beaver, game of all kinds abounded,
and the bluffs near the well-timbered
banks of the river were covered with
rich gramma grass, on which their
half-starved animals speedily improved
in condition.

They remained for some weeks encamped
on the right bank of the stream,
during which period they lost one of
their number, who was shot with an
arrow whilst lying asleep within a few
feet of the camp-fire.

The Navajos continually prowl
along that portion of the river which
runs through the settlements of New
Mexico, preying upon the cowardly
inhabitants, and running off with their
cattle whenever they are exposed in
sufficient numbers to tempt them.
Whilst ascending the river, they met
a party of these Indians returning to
their mountain homes with a large
band of mules and horses which they
had taken from one of the Mexican
towns, besides several women and
children, whom they had captured, as
slaves. The main body of the trappers
halting, ten of the band followed
and charged upon the Indians, who
numbered at least sixty, killed seven of
them, and retook the prisoners and the
whole cavallada of horses and mules.
Great were the rejoicings when they
entered Socorro, the town from whence
the women and children had been
taken, and as loud the remonstrances,
when, handing them over to their families,
the trappers rode on, driving
fifty of the best of the rescued animals
before them, which they retained as
payment for their services. Messengers
were sent on to Albuquerque
with intelligence of the proceeding;
and as there were some troops stationed
there, the commandant was
applied to to chastise the insolent
whites.

That warrior, on learning that the
trappers numbered less than fifteen,
became alarmingly brave, and ordering
out the whole of his disposable
force, some two hundred dragoons,
sallied out to intercept the audacious
mountaineers. About noon one day,
just as the latter had emerged from
a little town between Socorro and
Albuquerque, they descried the imposing
force of the dragoons winding along
a plain ahead. As the trappers advanced,
the officer in command halted
his men, and sent out a trumpeter to
order the former to await his coming.
Treating the herald to a roar of laughter,
on they went, and, as they approached
the soldiers, broke into a trot,
ten of the number forming line in front
of the packed and loose animals, and,
rifle in hand, charging with loud
whoops. This was enough for the
New Mexicans. Before the enemy
were within shooting distance, the
gallant fellows turned tail, and splashed
into the river, dragging themselves
up the opposite bank like half-drowned
rats, and saluted with loud peels of
laughter by the victorious mountaineers,
who, firing a volley into the air,
in token of supreme contempt, quietly
continued their route up the stream.

Before reaching the capital of the
province, they struck again to the
westward, and following a small creek
to its junction with the Green River,
ascended that stream, trapping en
route to the Uintah or Snake Fork,
and arrived at Roubideau’s rendezvous
early in the fall, where they quickly
disposed of their peltries, and were
once more on “the loose.”

Here La Bonté married a Snake
squaw, with whom he crossed the
mountains and proceeded to the Platte
through the Bayou Salado, where he
purchased of the Yutes a commodious
lodge, with the necessary poles, &c.;
and being now “rich” in mules and
horses, and all things necessary for[138]
otium cum dignitate, he took unto
himself another wife, as by mountain
law allowed; and thus equipped, with
both his better halves attired in all the
glory of fofarraw, he went his way
rejoicing.

In a snug little valley lying under
the shadow of the mountains, watered
by Vermilion Creek, and in which
abundance of buffalo, elk, deer, and
antelope fed and fattened on the rich
grass, La Bonté raised his lodge, employing
himself in hunting, and fully
occupying his wives’ time in dressing
the skins of the many animals he
killed. Here he enjoyed himself amazingly
until the commencement of winter,
when he determined to cross to
the North Fork and trade his skins,
of which he had now as many packs
as his animals could carry. It happened
that he had left his camp one
day, to spend a couple of days hunting
buffalo in the mountain, whither the
bulls were now resorting, intending to
“put out” for Platte on his return.
His hunt, however, had led him farther
into the mountains than he anticipated,
and it was only on the third day that
sundown saw him enter the little valley
where his camp was situated.

Crossing the creek, he was not a
little disturbed at seeing fresh Indian
sign on the opposite side, which led in
the direction of his lodge; and his
worst fears were realised when, on
coming within sight of the little plateau
where the conical top of his white
lodge had always before met his view,
he saw nothing but a blackened mass
strewing the ground, and the burnt
ends of the poles which had once
supported it.

Squaws, animals, and peltry, all
were gone—an Arapaho mocassin
lying on the ground told him where.
He neither fumed nor fretted, but
throwing the meat off his pack animal,
and the saddle from his horse,
he collected the blackened ends of the
lodge poles and made a fire—led his
beasts to water and hobbled them,
threw a piece of buffalo meat upon the
coals, squatted down before the fire,
and lit his pipe. La Bonté was a true
philosopher. Notwithstanding that his
house, his squaws, his peltries, were
gone “at one fell swoop,” the loss
scarcely disturbed his equanimity,
and before the tobacco in his pipe was
half smoked out, he had ceased to
think of his misfortune. Certes, as
he turned his apolla of tender loin, he
sighed as he thought of the delicate
manipulations with which his Shosshone
squaw, Sah-qua-manish, was
wont to beat to tenderness the toughest
bull meat—and missed the tending
care of Yute Chil-co-thē, or the “reed
that bends,” in patching the holes
worn in his neatly fitting mocassin,
the work of her nimble fingers. However,
he ate and smoked, and smoked
and ate, and slept none the worse for
his mishap; thought, before he closed
his eyes, a little of his lost wives, and
more perhaps of the “Bending Reed”
than Sah-qua-manish, or “she who
runs with the stream,” drew his blanket
tightly round him, felt his rifle
handy to his grasp, and was speedily
asleep.

As the tired mountaineer breathes
heavily in his dream, careless and
unconscious that a living soul is near,
his mule on a sudden pricks her ears
and stares into the gloom, from whence
a figure soon emerges, and with noiseless
steps draws near the sleeping
hunter. Taking one look at the slumbering
form, the same figure approaches
the fire and adds a log to the pile;
which done, it quietly seats itself at
the feet of the sleeper, and remains
motionless as a statue. Towards
morning the hunter awoke, and, rubbing
his eyes, was astonished to feel
the glowing warmth of the fire striking
on his naked feet, which, in Indian
fashion, were stretched towards
it; as by this time, he knew, the fire
he left burning must long since have
expired. Lazily raising himself on
his elbow, he saw a figure sitting near
it with the back turned to him, which,
although his exclamatory wagh was
loud enough in all conscience, remained
perfectly motionless, until the trapper
rising, placed his hand upon the shoulder:
then, turning up its face, the
features displayed to his wondering
eye were those of Chilcothē, his Yuta
wife. Yes, indeed, the “reed that
bends” had escaped from her Arapaho
captors, and made her way back to her
white husband, fasting and alone.

The Indian women who follow the
fortunes of the white hunters are
remarkable for their affection and
fidelity to their husbands, the which
virtues, it must be remarked, are all
on their own side; for, with very few[139]
exceptions, the mountaineers seldom
scruple to abandon their Indian wives,
whenever the fancy takes them to
change their harems; and on such
occasions the squaws, thus cast aside,
wild with jealousy and despair, have
been not unfrequently known to take
signal vengeance both on their faithless
husbands and the successful beauties
who have supplanted them in
their affections. There are some honourable
exceptions, however, to such
cruelty, and many of the mountaineers
stick to their red-skinned wives for
better and for worse, often suffering
them to gain the upper hand in the
domestic economy of the lodges, and
being ruled by their better halves in
all things pertaining to family affairs;
and it may be remarked, when once
the lady dons the unmentionables, she
becomes the veriest termagant that ever
henpecked an unfortunate husband.

Your refined trappers, however,
who, after many years of bachelor life,
incline to take to themselves a better
half, often undertake an expedition
into the settlements of New Mexico,
where not unfrequently they adopt a
very “Young Lochinvar” system in
procuring the required rib; and have
been known to carry off, vi et armis,
from the midst of a fandango in Fernandez,
or El Rancho of Taos, some
dark-skinned beauty—with or without
her own consent is a matter of unconcern—and
bear the ravished fair one
across the mountains, where she soon
becomes inured to the free and roving
life which fate has assigned her.

American women are valued at a
low figure in the mountains. They
are too fine and “fofarraw.” Neither
can they make mocassins, or dress
skins; nor are they so schooled to perfect
obedience to their lords and masters
as to stand a “lodge poleing,”
which the western lords of the creation
not unfrequently deem it their bounden
duty to inflict upon their squaws for
some dereliction of domestic duty.

To return, however, to La Bonté.
That worthy thought himself a lucky
man to have lost but one of his wives,
and the worst at that. “Here’s the
beauty,” he philosophised, “of having
two ‘wiping sticks’ to your rifle; if the
one break whilst ramming down a ball,
still there’s hickory left to supply its
place.” Although, with animals and
peltry, he had lost several hundred
dollars’ worth of “possibles,” he never
groaned or grumbled. “There’s redskin
will pay for this,” he once muttered,
and was done.

Packing all that was left on the
mule, and mounting Chil-co-thē on his
buffalo horse, he shouldered his rifle
and struck the Indian trail for Platte.
On Horse Creek they came upon a
party of French[5] trappers and hunters,
who were encamped with their lodges
and Indian squaws, and formed quite
a village. Several old companions
were amongst them; and, to celebrate
the arrival of a “camarade,” a splendid
dog-feast was prepared in honour
of the event. To effect this, the
squaws sallied out of their lodges to
seize upon sundry of the younger and
plumper of the pack, to fill the kettles
for the approaching feast. With a
presentiment of the fate in store for
them, the curs slunk away with tails
between their legs, and declined the
pressing invitations of the anxious
squaws. These shouldered their tomahawks
and gave chase; but the cunning
pups outstripped them, and would
have fairly beaten the kettles, if some
of the mountaineers had not stepped
out with their rifles and quickly laid
half-a-dozen ready to the knife. A
cayeute, attracted by the scent of blood,
drew near, unwitting of the canine
feast in progress, and was likewise
soon made dog of, and thrust into the
boiling kettle with the rest.

The feast that night was long protracted;
and so savoury was the stew,
and so agreeable to the palates of the
hungry hunters, that at the moment
when the last morsel was being drawn
from the pot, and all were regretting
that a few more dogs had not been
slaughtered, a wolfish-looking cur incautiously
poked his long nose and head
under the lodge skin, and was instantly
pounced upon by the nearest hunter,
who in a moment drew his knife across
the animal’s throat, and threw it to a
squaw to skin and prepare it for the
pot. The wolf had long since been
vigorously discussed, and voted by all
hands to be “good as dog.”

“Meat’s meat,” is a common saying[140]
in the mountains, and from the buffalo
down to the rattlesnake, including
every quadruped that runs, every fowl
that flies, and every reptile that creeps,
nothing comes amiss to the mountaineer.
Throwing aside all the qualms
and conscientious scruples of a fastidious
stomach, it must be confessed that
dog-meat takes a high rank in the wonderful
variety of cuisine afforded to
the gourmand and the gourmet by the
prolific “mountains.” Now, when the
bill of fare offers such tempting viands
as buffalo beef, venison, mountain
mutton, turkey, grouse, wildfowl,
hares, rabbits, beaver and their tails,
&c., &c., the station assigned to “dog”
as No. 2 in the list can be well appreciated—No.
1, in delicacy of flavour,
richness of meat, and other good
qualities, being the flesh of panthers,
which surpasses every other, and
all put together.

“Painter meat can’t ‘shine’ with
this,” says a hunter, to express the
delicious flavour of an extraordinary
cut of “tender loin,” or delicate fleece.

La Bonté started with his squaw
for the North Fork early in November,
and arrived at the Laramie at the
moment that the big village of the
Sioux came up for their winter trade.
Two other villages were encamped
lower down the Platte, including the
Brulés and the Yanka-taus, who were
now on more friendly terms with the
whites. The first band numbered several
hundred lodges, and presented quite
an imposing appearance, the village
being laid out in parallel lines, the
lodge of each chief being marked with
his particular totem. The traders had
a particular portion of the village
allotted to them, and a line was
marked out which was strictly kept
by the soldiers appointed for the protection
of the whites. As there were
many rival traders, and numerous
coureurs des bois, or peddling ones, the
market promised to be brisk, the more
so as a large quantity of ardent spirits
was in their possession, which would
be dealt with no unsparing hand to
put down the opposition of so many
competing traders.

In opening a trade a quantity of
liquor is first given “on the prairie,”[6]
as the Indians express it in words, or
by signs in rubbing the palm of one
hand quickly across the other, holding
both flat. Having once tasted the
pernicious liquid, there is no fear but
they will quickly come to terms; and
not unfrequently the spirit is drugged,
to render the unfortunate Indians still
more helpless. Sometimes, maddened
and infuriated by drink, they commit
the most horrid atrocities on each
other, murdering and mutilating in a
barbarous manner, and often attempting
the lives of the traders themselves.
On one occasion a band of Sioux,
whilst under the influence of liquor,
attacked and took possession of a
trading fort of the American Fur Company,
stripping it of every thing it
contained, and roasting the trader
himself over his own fire during the
process.

The principle on which the nefarious
trade is conducted is this, that the Indians,
possessing a certain quantity of
buffalo robes, have to be cheated out
of them, and the sooner the better.
Although it is explicitly prohibited
by the laws of the United States to
convey spirits across the Indian frontier,
and its introduction amongst the
Indian tribes subjects the offender to
a heavy penalty; yet the infraction of
this law is of daily occurrence, and
perpetrated almost in the very presence
of the government officers, who
are stationed along the frontier for the
very purpose of enforcing the laws for
the protection of the Indians.

The misery entailed upon these unhappy
people by the illicit traffic must
be seen to be fully appreciated. Before
the effects of the poisonous “fire-water,”
they disappear from the earth
like “snow before the sun;” and
knowing the destruction it entails
upon them, the poor wretches have
not moral courage to shun the fatal
allurement it holds out to them, of
wild excitement and a temporary oblivion
of their many sufferings and
privations. With such palpable effects,
it appears only likely that the illegal
trade is connived at by those whose
policy it has ever been gradually but
surely to exterminate the Indians,
and by any means extinguish their
title to the few lands they now own on
the outskirts of civilisation. Certain[141]
it is that large quantities of liquor find
their way annually into the Indian
country, and as certain are the fatal
results of the pernicious system, and
that the American government takes
no steps to prevent it. There are
some tribes who have as yet withstood
the great temptation, and have
resolutely refused to permit liquor to
be brought into their villages. The
marked difference between the improved
condition of these, and the
moral and physical abasement of those
tribes which give way to the fatal
passion for drinking, sufficiently proves
the pernicious effects of the liquor
trade on the unfortunate and abused
aborigines; and it is matter of regret
that no philanthropist has sprung up
in the United States to do battle for
the rights of the Red man, and call
attention to the wrongs they endure
at the hands of their supplanters in
the lands of their fathers.

Robbed of their homes and hunting-grounds,
and driven by the encroachments
of the whites to distant regions,
which hardly support their bare existence,
the Indians, day by day, are
gradually decreasing before the accumulating
evils, of body and soul,
which their civilised persecutors entail
upon them. With every man’s
hand against them, they drag on to
their final destiny; and the day is not
far distant when the American Indian
will exist only in the traditions of his
pale-faced conquerors.

The Indians who were trading at
this time on the Platte were mostly
of the Sioux nation, including the
tribes of Burnt-woods, Yanka-taus,
Pian-Kashas, Assinaboins, Oglallahs,
Broken Arrows, all of which belong to
the great Sioux nation, or La-cotahs,
as they call themselves, and which
means cut-throats. There were also
some Cheyennes allied to the Sioux,
as well as a small band of Republican
Pawnees.

Horse-racing, gambling, and ball-play,
served to pass away the time
until the trade commenced, and many
packs of dressed robes changed hands
amongst themselves. When playing
at the usual game of “hand,” the
stakes, comprising all the valuables
the players possess, are piled in two
heaps close at hand, the winner at the
conclusion of the game sweeping the
goods towards him, and often returning
a small portion “on the prairie,”
with which the loser may again commence
operations with another player.

The game of “hand” is played by
two persons. One, who commences,
places a plum or cherry-stone in the
hollow formed by joining the concaved
palms of the hands together, then
shaking the stone for a few moments,
the hands are suddenly separated, and
the other player must guess which
hand now contains the stone.

Large bets are often wagered on
the result of this favourite game, which
is also often played by the squaws,
the men standing round encouraging
them to bet, and laughing loudly at
their grotesque excitement.

A Burnt-wood Sioux, Tah-tunga-nisha,
and one of the bravest chiefs of
his tribe, when a young man, was out
on a solitary war expedition against
the Crows. One evening he drew near
a certain “medicine” spring, where,
to his astonishment, he encountered a
Crow warrior in the act of quenching
his thirst. He was on the point of
drawing his bow upon him, when he
remembered the sacred nature of the
spot, and making the sign of peace, he
fearlessly drew near his foe, and proceeded
likewise to slake his thirst. A
pipe of kinnik-kinnik being produced,
it was proposed to pass away the early
part of the night in a game of “hand.”
They accordingly sat down beside the
spring, and commenced the game.

Fortune favoured the Crow. He
won arrow after arrow from the Burnt-wood
brave; then his bow, his club,
his knife, his robe, all followed, and
the Sioux sat naked on the plain. Still
he proposed another stake against the
other’s winnings—his scalp. He
played, and lost; and bending forward
his head, the Crow warrior drew his
knife and quickly removed the bleeding
prize. Without a murmur the
luckless warrior rose to depart, but
first exacted a promise from his antagonist,
that he would meet him once
more at the same pot, and engage in
another trial of skill.

On the day appointed, the Burnt-wood
sought the spot, with a new
equipment, and again the Crow made
his appearance, and they sat down to
play. This time fortune changed
sides, and the Sioux won back his[142]
former losses, and in his turn the
Crow was stripped to his skin.

Scalp against scalp was now the
stake, and this time the Crow submitted
his head to the victorious
Burnt-wood’s knife; and both the
warriors stood scalpless on the plain.

And now the Crow had but one single
stake of value to offer, and the offer of
it, he did not hesitate to make. He
staked his life against the other’s winnings.
They played; and fortune
still being adverse, he lost. He offered
his breast to his adversary. The
Burnt-wood plunged his knife into his
heart to the very hilt; and, laden
with his spoils, returned to his village,
and to this day wears suspended from
his ears his own and enemy’s scalp.

The village presented the usual
scene of confusion as long as the trade
lasted. Fighting, brawling, yelling,
dancing, and all the concomitants of
intoxication, continued to the last drop
of the liquor-keg, when the reaction
after such excitement was almost
worse than the evil itself. During
this time, all the work devolved upon
the squaws, who, in tending the horses,
packing wood and water from a long
distance, had their time sufficiently
occupied. As there was little or no
grass in the vicinity, the animals were
supported entirely on the bark of the
cotton-wood; and to procure this, the
women were daily engaged in felling
huge trees, or climbing them fearlessly,
chopping off the upper limbs,—springing
like squirrels from branch to
branch, which, in their confined costume,
appeared matter of considerable
difficulty.

The most laughter-provoking scenes,
however, were, when a number of
squaws sallied out to the grove, with
their long-nosed, wolfish-looking dogs
harnessed to their travées or trabogans,
on which loads of cotton-wood were
piled. The dogs, knowing full well
the duty required of them, refuse to
approach the coaxing squaws, and, at
the same time, are fearful of provoking
their anger by escaping and running
off. They, therefore, squat on
their haunches, with tongues hanging
out of their long mouths, the picture
of indecision, removing a short distance
as the irate squaw approaches.
When once harnessed to the travée,
however, which is simply a couple of
lodge-poles lashed on either side of the
dog, with a couple of cross-bars near
the ends to support the freight, they
follow quietly enough, urged by bevies
of children, who invariably accompany
the women. When arrived at the
scene of their labours, the reluctance
of the curs to draw near the piles of
cotton-wood is most comical. They
will lie down stubbornly at a little
distance, whining their uneasiness, or
sometimes scamper off bodily, with
their long poles trailing after them,
pursued by the yelling and half frantic
squaws.

When the travées are laden, the
squaws take the lead, bent double
under loads of wood sufficient to break
a porter’s back, and calling to the
dogs, which are urged on by the buffalo-fed
urchins in rear, take up the
line of march. The curs, taking advantage
of the helpless state of their
mistresses, turn a deaf ear to their
coaxings, lying down every few yards
to rest, growling and fighting with
each other, in which encounters every
cur joins, the mêlée, charging pell-mell
into the yelping throng; upsetting the
squalling children, and making confusion
worse confounded. Then, armed
with lodge-poles, the squaws, throwing
down their loads, rush to the
rescue, dealing stalwart blows on the
pugnacious curs, and finally restoring
something like order to the march.

“Tszoo—tszoo!” they cry, “wah,
kashne, ceitcha—get on, you devilish
beasts—tszoo—tszoo!” and belabouring
them without mercy, start them
into a gallop, which, once effected,
they generally continue till they reach
their destination.

The Indian dogs are, however, invariably
well treated by the squaws,
since they assist materially the everyday
labours of these patient overworked
creatures, in hauling firewood
to the lodge, and, on the line of march,
carrying many of the household goods
and chattels which otherwise the squaw
herself would have to carry on her
back. Every lodge possesses from
half-a-dozen to a score,—some for
draught and others for eating,—for dog
meat forms part and parcel of an Indian
feast. The former are stout,
wiry animals, half wolf half sheep-dog,
and are regularly trained to draught;
the latter are of a smaller kind, more[143]
inclined to fat, and embrace every
variety of the genus cur. Many of
the southern tribes possess a breed of
dogs entirely divested of hair, which
evidently have come from South
America, and are esteemed highly for
the kettle. Their meat, in appearance
and flavour, resembles young
pork, but far surpasses it in richness
and delicacy of flavour.

The Sioux are very expert in making
their lodges comfortable, taking
more pains in their construction than
most Indians. They are all of conical
form: a framework of straight slender
poles, resembling hop-poles, and from
twenty to twenty-five feet long, is first
erected, round which is stretched a
sheeting of buffalo robes, softly dressed,
and smoked to render them watertight.
The apex, through which the
ends of the poles protrude, is left open
to allow the smoke to escape. A small
opening, sufficient to permit the entrance
of a man, is made on one side,
over which is hung a door of buffalo
hide. A lodge of the common size
contains about twelve or fourteen
skins, and contains comfortably a family
of twelve in number. The fire is
made in the centre immediately under
the aperture in the roof, and a flap of
the upper skins, is closed or extended
at pleasure, serving as a cowl or
chimney-top to regulate the draught
and permit the smoke to escape freely.
Round the fire, with their feet towards
it, the inmates sleep on skins and
buffalo rugs, which are rolled up during
the day, and stowed at the back
of the lodge.

In travelling, the lodge-poles are
secured half on each side a horse, and
the skins placed on transversal bars
near the ends, which trail along the
ground,—two or three squaws or children
mounted on the same horse, or
the smallest of the latter borne in the
dog travées. A set of lodge-poles
will last from three to seven years,
unless the village is constantly on the
move, when they are soon worn out
in trailing over the gravelly prairie.
They are usually of ash, which grows
on many of the mountain creeks, and
regular expeditions are undertaken
when a supply is required, either for
their own lodges, or for trading with
those tribes who inhabit the prairies
at a great distance from the locality
where the poles are procured.

There are also certain creeks where
the Indians resort to lay in a store of
kinnik-kinnik, (the inner bark of the
red, willow,) which they use as a substitute
for tobacco, and which has an
aromatic and very pungent flavour.
It is prepared for smoking by being
scraped in thin curly flakes from the
slender saplings, and crisped before
the fire, after which it is rubbed between
the hands into a form resembling
leaf-tobacco, and stored in skin bags
for use. It has a highly narcotic
effect on those not habituated to its
use, and produces a heaviness sometimes
approaching stupefaction, altogether
different from the soothing
effects of tobacco.

Every year, owing to the disappearance
of the buffalo from their former
haunts, the Indians are necessitated
to encroach upon each other’s hunting-grounds,
which is a fruitful cause of
war between the different tribes. It
is a curious fact, that the buffalo retire
before the whites, while the presence
of Indians in their pastures appears in
no degree to disturb them. Wherever
a few white hunters are congregated
in a trading port, or elsewhere, so sure
it is that, if they remain in the same
locality, the buffalo will desert the
vicinity, and seek pasture elsewhere;
and in this, the Indians affirm the
wah-keitcha, or “bad medicine,” of
the pale-faces is very apparent; and
ground their well-founded complaints
of the encroachments made upon their
hunting-grounds by the white hunters.

In the winter, many of the tribes
are reduced to the very verge of starvation—the
buffalo having passed from
their country into that of their enemies,
when no other alternative is offered
them, but to remain where they are
and starve, or follow the game into a
hostile region, entailing a war and
all its horrors upon them.

Reckless, moreover, of the future,
in order to prepare robes for the
traders, and procure the pernicious
fire-water, they wantonly slaughter
vast numbers of buffalo cows every
year, (the skins of which sex only are
dressed,) and thus add to the evils in
store for them. When questioned on
this subject, and such want of foresight[144]
being pointed out to them, they answer,
that however quickly the buffalo
disappears, the Red man “goes under”
in greater proportion; and that the
Great Spirit has ordained that both
shall be “rubbed out” from the face
of nature at one and the same time,—”that
arrows and bullets are not
more fatal to the buffalo than the
small-pox and fire-water to them,
and that before many winters’ snows
have disappeared, the buffalo and the
Red man will only be remembered by
their bones, which will strew the
plains.”—”They look forward, however,
to a future state, when, after a
long journey, they will reach the happy
hunting-grounds, where buffalo will
once more blacken the prairies; where
the pale-faces daren’t come to disturb
them; where no winter snows cover
the ground, and the buffalo are always
plentiful and fat.”

As soon as the streams opened, La
Bonté, now reduced to but two animals
and four traps, sallied forth
again, this time seeking the dangerous
country of the Blackfeet, on the head
waters of the Yellow Stone and Upper
Missouri. He was accompanied by
three others, a man named Wheeler,
and one Cross-Eagle, a Swede, who
had been many years in the western
country. Reaching the fork of a
small creek, on both of which appeared
plenty of beaver sign, La Bonté followed
the left-hand one alone, whilst
the others trapped the right in company,
the former leaving his squaw in
the company of a Sioux woman, who
followed the fortunes of Cross-Eagle,
the party agreeing to rendezvous at
the junction of the two forks as soon
as they had trapped to their heads
and again descended them. The
larger party were the first to reach
the rendezvous, and camped on the
banks of the main stream to await the
arrival of La Bonté.

The morning after their return, they
had just risen from their blankets, and
were lazily stretching themselves before
the fire, when a volley of firearms
rattled from the bank of the
creek, and two of their number fell
dead to the ground, at the same moment
that the deafening yells of Indians
broke upon the ears of the
frightened squaws. Cross-Eagle seized
his rifle, and, though severely wounded,
rushed to the cover of a hollow tree
which stood near, and crawling into
it, defended himself the whole day
with the greatest obstinacy, killing
five Indians outright, and wounding
several more. Unable to drive the
gallant trapper from his retreat, the
savages took advantage of a favourable
wind which sprang up suddenly,
and fired the long and dried-up grass
which surrounded the tree. The rotten
log catching fire at length compelled
the hunter to leave his retreat, and,
clubbing his rifle, he charged amongst
the Indians, and fell at last pierced
through and through with wounds,
but not before two more of his assailants
had fallen by his hand.

The two squaws were carried off,
and, shortly after, one was sold to some
white men at the trading ports on the
Platte; but La Bonté never recovered
the “Bending Reed,” nor even heard
of her existence from that day. So
once more was the mountaineer bereft
of his better half; and when he returned
to the rendezvous, a troop of
wolves were feasting on the bodies of
his late companions, and of the Indians
killed in the affray, of which he only
heard the particulars a long time after
from a trapper, who had been present
when one of the squaws was offered
at the trading post for sale, and who
had recounted the miserable fate of her
husband and his companions on the
forks of the creek, which, from the
fact of that trapper being the leader
of the party, is still called La Bonté’s
Creek.

Nevertheless, he continued his solitary
hunt, passing through the midst
of the Crow and Blackfeet country;
encountering many perils, often hunted
by the Indians, but escaping all; and
speedily loading both his animals with
beaver, he thought of bending his
steps to some of the trading rendezvous
on the other side of the mountains,
where employés of the Great Northwest
Fur Company meet the trappers
with the produce of their hunts, on
Lewis’s fork of the Columbia, or one
of its numerous affluents, and intending
to pass the winter at some of the
company’s trading posts in Oregon,
into which country he had never yet
penetrated.

[145]

ART—ITS PROSPECTS. CLEGHORN’S ANCIENT AND MODERN ART.

[7]

As the age in which Shakspeare
wrote, had he not been in existence,
would still have been remarkable on
account of its dramatic writers, so the
Cinque Cento is equally distinguished
as the era of the arts. Yet has no very
satisfactory cause been assigned for
the direction of the human mind to
these particular pursuits at these precise
periods; for, simultaneously in
countries differing in climate, governments,
and manners, have the requisite
men of genius arisen.

It might be easier to account for the
depression than the rise of the noblest
arts. Of this we shall presently speak;
aware, at the same time, how ungracious
will be the words which
will admit of a decadence among ourselves.
When we boast of our “enlightened
age,” it would not be amiss
that we stay for a moment our pride,
look back, and consider how much we
have absolutely lost; in how much we
are inferior. Every age seems destined
to do its own work, which it
does nearly to the perfection of its
given art or science. Succeeding ages
are destined rather to invent new than
to improve upon the old. What has
been done, becomes an accumulated
wealth that Time deposits ever, and
passes on to continual work to add
fresh materials, and stock the world
with the means of general improvement
and happiness. There is always
progression, but it is a progression of
invention; the destined works are too
vast, too infinite to allow a long delay
in the advancement of any one accomplishment.
It is rapidly completed; we
are scarcely allowed time to stand and
wonder; we must pass on to perform
something new. Yet, if such attained
thing shall be lost, or nearly so, the
power to create it again may be again
given; but it works de novo, adapting
itself to the new principle which has
rendered the reproduction advantageous,
if not necessary. Thus, for instance,
in the ages which we are
pleased to call dark, to what magnitude
and what exactness of beauty did
not architecture reach, and that in a
particularly inventive style—the Gothic—borrowing
not from what had
before been, and which had been
held perfect, a style upon which we
do not now even hope to improve,
but content ourselves with admiring
and copying. Thus it should seem
that where any thing like a practical
continuance of an art has been
permitted, the entirely new direction
it has taken would show that invention,
required for the age, was the
object, and that, too, bounded by a
limit. “For this purpose have I raised
thee up,” would appear to be the text
upon which the histories of the arts,
as of every thing human, may be considered
the comment.

It is to the total loss of ancient art
that mankind are indebted for its revival,
its re-discovery, as it were; for
little or nothing was left from which, as
from an old stock, art was to begin.

The new Christian principle created
a new mind, to which there was little
consonant in what was known, however
imperfectly, of ancient works.
Hence what is termed revival might,
with more aptitude of expression, be
called the re-discovery.

Had art been uninterruptedly continued
from the days of Apelles, it
would probably have degenerated to
its lowest state. The destruction, the
altogether vanishing away of the former
glory, was essential to the rise of the
new. All was nearly obliterated. Of
the innumerable statues of which
Greece was plundered by the Romans,
but six were to be found—five of
marble, and one of brass—in the city
of Rome, at the beginning of the
fifteenth century; so that art may be
said to have been defunct. The decadence
of architecture seems also to
have been required for the originating
the Gothic, for the inventing altogether
a new style, which had no prototype.
It was necessary to the establishing
the Christian principle operatively,
that the mind should be wrested
powerfully from former and antagonistic[146]
ideas. And this could scarcely
have been effected had any thing like
a continual, an important succession of
vigorous life in these arts been allowed.

It seems to have been the work of a
great guiding will, that the way should
be prepared for renovation, by the
almost entire loss or mutilation of the
greatest works of former periods, and
by the veil of ignorance which victorious
barbarism spread before all eyes,
that they should not distinguish
through that cloud the remnant of a
glory which was too great to be altogether
destroyed. The very language
which spoke of it was a buried charm,
that the oblivion might be more perfect.
And not until the now grown
Christian mind required the re-discovery
of art, was that tongue loosened.
The revival of ancient literature and
the birth of new art were simultaneous.
With the latter, at least, it was more
than a sleep from which it arose—it
was from a death, with all the marks
of its corruption.

We do not mean to assert that art
rose at once full-grown, as Pallas from
the head of Jove. It had undoubtedly
its progression; but it did not grow from
an old stock; and hence it did grow
and arose unimpeded and unchoked
by an unwholesome exuberance, to
the greatest splendour and glory.
Whether there can be again any new
principle which will require new inventions,
it would be almost presumptuous
to consider; but we do feel
assured that should it be so, there will
not be an adaptation of present means
to it, but that the wing of oblivion
must have to sweep over, overshadow,
and obliterate the present multifarious
form and body of art. The fine arts
are not like the exact sciences, always
progressing from accumulative knowledge
towards their final and sure
establishment of truth; on the contrary,
their great truths recede further
from view, as knowledge is accumulated,
and practice, deteriorates by example.
Science is truth to be dug out
of the earth, as it were; a precious
ore, not strictly ours, but by and for
our use. The fine arts are in a far
greater degree ours, for they are of the
mind’s creation; they are the product
of a faculty given, indeed, but given
to create and not to gather, and dig
up ready-made for our purpose; they
are of that faculty which has given
the name to the poet, as altogether
the maker. They give that to the
world which it never could have received
by any accumulation of fact and
knowledge. Take away the individual
genius, the inventive, the creating
mind of the one man, the Homer, the
Dante, the Shakspeare, the Michael
Angelo, the Raffaelle, and the whole
product is annihilated; we cannot even
conceive of its existence, know of no
mine wherein to dig, no facts, no
knowledge out of which it can grow.
That creating power may, indeed,
turn all existing things to its use, all
facts and all knowledge; but it commands
and is not governed by them—is
a power in no degree dependant on
them, which would still be, though
they existed not—a power which, if it
exhausted worlds, would invent new for
its purpose. To whom, then, are such
powers given? for what purpose?—and
are they of a gift deteriorated in its
use and abuse? Alas! they are still
of the “corruptible,” and cannot, in
our present state, “put on incorruption.”
They are, however, of the mind,
which may be purified and strengthened,
or corrupted and degraded.

They effect in a great degree, and
suitably to the age’s requirement,
their purpose. Corrupted from the
ardour and sincerity of their first
passion, and by the admission, little
by little, of what is vicious, and yet
which, we must confess, has its beauty;
their very aim becomes changed, less
large by subdivision, and less sure by
confusion and uncertainty of aim, until
all purpose be lost, in a low satisfaction
in mere dexterity and mindless
imitation. And what shall stay art
in such downward way of decadence?
Can a strong impulse be given to it—for
there is no strength but the mind’s
strength? It is not patronage, but
purpose, which is wanted. What
shall revivify the passion that gave
it earnestness,—the sincerity, the trust
in itself, the confidence in its own
high-mindedness, the sense of the importance
of its objects, and the true
glory of their pursuit? We have our
fears that we are doing much to multiply
artists, and degrade art. We
distribute patronage in so many
streams, by our art-unions, that no
full fertilising current is visible. We
make a pauperism, and stamp it with
the disgrace of the beggarly contribution;[147]
we, pauperise the mind too,
by the demand for mean productions,
and by circulating, as the choicest
specimens of British art, engravings
which tend utterly to the deterioration
of the public taste. Perhaps
there is nothing more frightfully injurious
in the present state of art, than
this ever putting before the public
eye things in themselves bad, and
mostly bad, where badness is more
surely fatal, in purpose. It is far
easier for good taste and for good art,
in practice, to arise out of a blank,
out of nothing, than out of an exuberance
of bad examples. These
things tend to vitiate the pure. The
great daily accumulation of inferior
works, low in character, and deficient
in artistic knowledge and skill, that
are ever thrust before the public eye,
are doing much mischief. They are
poisoning and vitiating the ground
from which taste should spring. We
are not educating in art, but against
art. We are teaching to admire
things which, were it possible to keep
what is bad from the public eye,
would disgust as soon as seen. And
even where the exhibition is in no
other respect vicious, it is too often
vicious from the total absence of any
high purpose. For lack of object, we
look to some mere mechanical prettinesses;
and by habit learn first to
look for, and then to work for, nothing
more. When the great men of other
days, whose names we have now so
constantly in our mouths, dedicated
themselves to art, they did it with all
their soul. They had the earnestness
of a passion; and what they did not,
as we should now say, well, technically
viewing some of their early
works, they did to express some
strong and some worthy feeling. And
as they advanced in technical skill,
still they ever thought a certain dignity
and importance were essential to
their works. The public mind had
not yet felt satiety. But in time the
progeny of art multiplied. The trading
multitude had to entice purchasers,
and to persuade them that their
novelties were at least more pleasing,
if the aim was not so high. The new
lamps were cried up above the old.
Thus they first created a bad taste,
and then pandered to it. Cold conventionalities
took the place of feeling;
even beauty was studied more
for low sense, than for its moral,
and intellectual expression. Art was
smothered by her own children. The
brood has been too numerous, and
the productions as variable as the
brood. They who would do great
things were they allowed, are not
allowed. The lower fascinations have
taken possession of the public mind.
Patronage runs to the little, and the
greatest encouragement is to those
who will provide the market with
the cheapest, if not the best wares.
Artists must live as well as other
people. They cannot, if they would,
sacrifice themselves to work out great
and noble ideas, for which there is
no demand; and for this state of
things they are themselves in no small
degree to blame. It is their own cry
for patronage that has raised these
art-unions: the patronage has been
raised, but who gets it? They (like
the national guard in Paris) have
been superseded by their own inferior
workmen. And what shall remedy
all this superfœtation? First, let pains
be taken properly to educate in art
the public eye, and the public mind.
We rejoice to know that, while we
are writing, a society is forming,
similar to the Cambden Society, for
the publication of all important works
on art, whether old or original, and
for having the finest productions of
art engraved, in whatever country
they are to be found. As good taste
is the object, so care will be taken
that nothing of a deteriorating character
will be admitted; and works
will be produced which, in the present
state of general feeling, private speculation
would scarcely venture upon.
The works will, we are given to
understand, chiefly be distributable
among the members of the society;
but some, thought to be particularly
well adapted to give a better direction
to the public taste, will be generally
purchasable.

This society is of great promise—if
it succeeds at all, it will succeed eminently,
and we believe it must succeed.
It will, we have some hope
drive the low, the meaningless things
of the day out of the field. We are,
as a nation, really ignorant of art.
We know it not, as it has been. We
want to see the public eye acquainted,
through good engravings, with the
numerous fine frescos that cannot be[148]
generally known in any other way.
Whatever tends to the real advancement
of art will obtain the solicitous
attention of this society.

The Fine Arts Commission affords
another means of remedying the evils
that are besetting the profession, and
through them the public taste. We
do not like the Government competition
system. We go further—we do
not like the Government, we mean the
Commission, constituting themselves
judges and purveyors. This is not
the way to make great men. The
man of genius shrinks from the competition
system; nay, he fears or
doubts the judgment of his judges.
Perhaps he feels that he is himself
the best judge; and if he has a just
confidence in himself, he ought to feel
this. He will not like the check of
too much dictation as to subjects,
composition, or any of the detail.
We are persuaded that it would be far
wiser, both for the public and for art,
that the commissioners should studiously
select their man, without competition,
not for some one or more
pictures, but for a far wider range.
There will be still competition enough
for proper ambition in the number
still to be employed. Raffaelle had
the Vatican assigned to him, and that
at an early age; so would we gladly
see a large portion given to one man,
and let the whole be of his one mind,
and let him have his assistants if he
please. Let him be dominant, and if
he has within him a power, it will
come out; and it cannot be difficult
to find a few men of sense and vigour;
and even though they have not as yet
shown great powers, it does not follow
that they have them not—trust to
what they have, and more will grow.
But we have some even now capable
of performing beautiful works to do
honour to the nation. We should
rejoice to see their secretary released
from the clerkship of his office, and set
to work seriously with his hand and
his superintending mind. We would
impress this upon the consideration of
the commissioners as an indisputable
truth, that if they select a man of genius,
they select one superior to themselves—one
who is to teach, not to be
taught by them—and one with whose
arrangements, after their selection,
they should by no means interfere.
And supposing the worst, that they
have actually made an unfortunate
choice—what then? They have made
an experiment at no very great cost,
and may obliterate whatever is a disgrace.
The works of other painters
were obliterated in the Sistine Chapel
to make room for Michael Angelo.
Nor was there any hesitation in destroying
the labours of previous artists,
and even the suspended operations
of his old master, Perugino, that the
whole space might be open to the
genius of the youth Raffaelle. It
is whole, entire responsibility that
makes great men. Throw upon the
persons you select the whole weight,
and thereby give them the benefit
of all the glory; and whatever
be their powers, you tax them to the
utmost. We would have them by no
means interfered with, any more than
we would cripple the commander of
our armies abroad with the petty
counsels and restrictions of bureau-manufacture.
Nor should they be
too strictly limited as to time, nor
subjected to the continual questionings
of an ungenerous impatience. Let
the trust be conferred upon them as
an honour which they are to wear and
enjoy, not as a notice of their servility,
but of their freedom. That trust
is less likely to be abused the more
generously it is given. To fulfil it
then, becomes an ambition; and the
daily habit of this higher feeling, by
making the given work the all in all
of life, renders the men more fit for
it. Let the nation, expecting liberality
from the “Liberal Arts,” bestow
it—hold out high rewards, leave the
artists in all respects unshackled; and,
the intention of a work being approved
of, let not the time it is to occupy be
in the stipulation. And it would be
well to look to the promise of the
young as well as actual performances;
for the power to do will grow. Of
thirty-eight competitors convened at
Florence, Lorenzo Ghiberti, only
twenty-three years of age, was chosen
to execute the celebrated doors; the
work occupied forty years of his life.
The work is immortal, if human work
can be; and obtained this eulogium
from Michael Angelo, that “they
were worthy of being the gates of
Paradise.” He conferred honour upon
his city, and received such as was
worthy the city to bestow. “His
labours were justly appreciated, and[149]
ably rewarded by his fellow citizens,
who, besides granting him whatever
he demanded, assigned him a portion
of land, and elected him Gonfaloniere,
or chief magistrate of the state. His
bust was afterwards placed in the
baptistery.” Was the confidence, the
full trust, in the power of the young
Raffaelle misplaced? What wonders
did he not perform in his too short life!
Had he lived longer, he would without
question have reached the highest
honours his country had to bestow.

One word more on this subject of
generosity—of national generosity.
We seem to think it a great thing to
bestow a knighthood upon an artist
of eminence here and there, yet
give not the means of keeping the
dignity from conspicuous shame, of
maintaining a decent hospitality
among his brethren artists, by which
much general improvement might
evidently arise. All our real substantial
honours are conferred upon soldiers
and lawyers. They have estates
publicly given, and are raised to the
peerage; yet it is doubtful if one man
of genius, in literature and the arts,
does not deserve better of his country,
and confer upon it more glory, than
any ten of the other more favoured
professions: and more than this, the
name of one such genius will be remembered,
perhaps with some sense
of the disgrace of neglect, when all
the others are forgotten. Let a
lawyer be but a short period of his
life upon the woolsack, he will find
means to raise to himself a fortune,
and retire back upon private life with
an annual pension of thousands; while
the man of genius in arts and literature
is too often left in old age uncheered by
any acknowledgment, and perhaps
weighed down to death by embarrassments,
from which a delighted, improved,
and at the same time an
ungrateful country will not relieve
him. A government should know that
it is for the crown to honour a profession,
and thereby to make it worthy
the honour. We live in a country
where distinctions do much, and
are worse than profitless without adequate
means to sustain them. It
would be well if sometimes selections
were made in other directions than the
law and army, and if our peerage
were not unfrequently radiated with the
glory of genius. Why should a barren
baronetcy have been conferred on
the author of Waverley? Had he been
a conqueror in fifty battles, could he
have conferred more benefit than he
has conferred upon his country? Why
is it that there is always in our government
a jealousy of literature and the
arts? There has not been a decent
honour bestowed on either since the
reign of the unfortunate Charles.
Poets, painters, and sculptors, it is
vulgarly thought, are scarcely “alendi,”
and certainly “non saginandi.”
The arts might at least be given a
position in our universities. This, as
a first step, would do much,—it would
tend, too, mainly to raise the public
taste, which is daily sinking lower and
lower. We should be glad to see Mr
Eastlake made professor of painting
at Oxford, with an adequate establishment
there to enable him not only
to lecture, but to teach more practically
by design, in the very place of
all others in the kingdom where there
is most in feeling congenial with art.
We mention Mr Eastlake, not making
an invidious distinction, but because
his acquirements in literature, and his
valuable contributions to it, seem
most readily to point to him as a fit
occupant for the professor’s chair.
We have repeatedly, in the pages of
Maga, insisted upon the importance
of establishing the fine arts in our
universities, and at one time entertained
a hope that the Taylor Legacy
would have taken this direction. We
are not, however, sorry altogether
that it did not do so, for it would
surely be more advantageous that such
a movement should begin with the
Government. It would remedy, too,
more evils than one; it would give an
occupation of mind, congenial with
their academic studies, to our youth,
and preserve them from a dangerous
extravagance both of purse and of
opinions. The hopes, however, of
any thing really advantageous to the
fine arts arising from our Government,
unless very strongly urged to it,
are small. They do not seem inclined
at all to favour the profession; they
would look upon it as solely addicted
to the labour of the hand with a view
to small profits—a portion of which
profits, too, upon some strange principles
of the political economists, they[150]
would appropriate to the nation as a
fine, the penalty of genius. One would
imagine, from the proposition of the
Board of Trade to take 10 per cent
from subscriptions to art-unions for
the purchasing pictures for the National
Gallery, that they considered
the epithet “fine” so appropriated to
the arts as intended originally to suggest
a tax. They would not allow
the profession a free trade. Whatever
is obtained by exhibiting works
of artists, should be as much their
property as would the product of
any other manufacture be the property
of the respective adventurers, and the
art-union subscriptions are undoubtedly
a portion of these profits. What,
in common justice, have the public
to do with them? The proposed
scheme is a step towards communism,
and may have been borrowed from the
French provisional seizure of their
railroads. With equal justice might
they require that every butcher and
baker and tailor should give a portion
of his meat, his bread, and his
cloth to feed and clothe our army and
navy; and this not as of a common
taxation, but as an extra compliment
and advantage to these trades. There
is a great deal too much here of the
beggarly utilitarian view. We advocate
not the cause of art-unions—we
think them perfectly mischievous, and
would gladly see them suppressed;
but surely to invite and tempt the
poor artists to paint their twenty and
five-and-twenty pound pictures, and
coolly to take 10 per cent out of their
pockets to purchase to yourself a gallery
of art, is not very consonant to
our general ideas of what is due to the
liberal arts. The liberality is certainly
not reciprocal.

Nor, indeed, when we view the
state of our National Gallery, considering
the building as well as what
it contains, can we be induced to think
that the Government are very much in
earnest in their profession of a desire
to raise its importance. The National
Gallery has its committee, and there
is the Commission of Fine Arts. The
former like not a questioning Parliament,
and have not sufficient confidence
in themselves to disregard the
uncomplimentary animadversions of a
critical press; and so the National
Gallery advances not. The latter
appear to treat art too much as a taxable
commodity, and as having a right
to levy specimens, and take for the
public the profit of them, when they
are required to cater for any national
works. We do not, however, doubt
their sincere desire to promote the
arts; but we do doubt if they are perfectly
alive to the real importance of
the work they have to do, and fear
their efforts are rendered less useful by
the number and conflicting tastes of
the members. Divisions and subdivisions
of responsibility terminate
too frequently in many little things
which, put together, do not make one
great one.

However deficient, or however
faulty in our taste, there seems to be
at the present moment a more general
desire to become acquainted with art
and its productions in former ages.
Publications of historical and critical
importance are not wanting; but it is
singular that the prevailing patronage
is little influenced as yet by the knowledge
received. From whatever cause
it may arise, the fact is manifest that
we have not a distinct School of Art.
It might be quite correct to assert,
that there is no characteristic school,
not one founded on a principle—a
principle distinguished from former
influences—in any country of Europe.
We do not even except the German
schools; for able though the men be
and honoured, they show no symptom
of an inventive faculty, which can
alone make a school. They are as yet
in their imitative state—in that of revival.
They are in the trammels of
an artistic superstition. They have
no one great and new idea to realise.
They make their commencement from
art, not from mind—forgetful of this
truth, that art cannot grow out of
art: for, if good, it seduces the mind
into mere imitation, which soon becomes
effect; if bad, it incapacitates
from conceiving the beautiful. Art
cannot grow out of art; it may progress
from its inferior to its better
state, till the idea of its principle has
been completed. It must then begin
again from a new—from an idea not
yet embodied—or it will inevitably
decline, from the causes named, to
mediocrity.

It does not at all follow, in this rise
of new art—or, if we please, revival of[151]
art—that there shall be at first a consciousness
of working upon a new
principle, or a positive purpose to deviate
(for such a purpose would be but
a vagary and extravagance, relying
on no principle:) there must be some
want of the day strongly felt, some
feeling to be embodied, some impress
of the times to be stamped and made
visible. Hence alone can arise a new
principle of art; and it is one that cannot
be preconceived, it must have its
birth without forethought, and possibly
without a knowledge that it exists;
it may be in the artist’s mind,
an unconscious purpose working
through the conscious processes of art.
The age in which we live has a strong
desire to know all about art, as to advance
in knowledge of every kind; but
has it in itself one characteristic feeling,
one strong impulse, favourable to
art, such as will make genius start up,
as it were, from his slumber and his
dream, and do his real work? Nor
can this be prophesied of; for, if it
could, it would exist somewhere, at
least in the mind of the prophet. It
is like the statue existing in the block;
but it is the hand of time, under direction
that we wot not of, that must be
cutting it away. Nor is it fair, for
any lack in one power of mind, to underrate
the age in which we live. It
may be great in another power to do
a destined work; that work done, another
may be required, and another
power be developed, in which art may
be the required means to the more perfect
vivifying a new principle. The
genius of our day is too busy in the
world’s doings, in striving to advance
utility, to have leisure, or to take an
interest in the ideal and poetical. A
great poetry it is indeed in itself, with
all its mighty engines, working with
iron arms more vast and powerful
than fable could imagine of Brontes
and Steropes, and all the huge manufacturers
of thunderbolts for an Ideal
Jove. Reality has outgrown fiction,—has
become the “major videri,”—is
doing a sublime work—one, too, in
which poetry of high cast is inherent,
through hands and means most unpoetical.
Mind is there, thought is
there, worthy of all the greatness of
man’s reputation for sagacity or invention,
and gigantic energy; the
reaching to and grasping the large
powers of nature, and adding them to
his own body, thus becoming, unconscious
of the poetic analogy, a Titan
again. This age is, after all, doing a
great deed. Let the dreamer, the versifier,
the searcher after visible beauty,
the painter, the statuary, incapacitated
as they all generally are from the
knowledge of what we term the business
of life, consider coolly, without
prejudice for his art, and against what
more commonly meets him in some interrupting
and ungracious form, reality,
the machinery of governments,
the science of banking, the law of markets,
and the innumerable detail of
which he seldom thinks, but without
the establishment of which he would
not be allowed to think,—by which he
lives his daily life; let him trace any
one manufacture through all its successive
ingenuities to its great uses
and its great results. Let him travel
a few hundred miles on a railroad, and
note how all is ordered, with what
precision all arrangements are made
and conducted, and what a world it is
in itself, moving through space like a
world, and set in motion and stayed
by the hand of one of his own Saxon
blood; and then, in idea, transferring
himself from his own work, and his
pride of his own art, let him ask himself
if he sees not something beyond,
quite extraneous to himself, a great
thing effected, which he never could
have conceived nor have executed;
and then let him say if there be not even
in this our working world, a great and
living poetry, a magnificent thought
realised, a principle brought out,
worthy an age; and then let him be
content for a while that his own particular
capacity should for a time be
in abeyance, to great purposes inoperative,
unproductive of the world’s
esteem. It may be that he will but
have to wait for his season. His time
may come again. Some new principle in
the world’s action, with possibly a
secret and electric power, may reach
him, enter his own mind, and set at
large all his capacities, and make them
felt; for that principle, whatever it is
to be, will be electric, too, in the general
mind. It may arise naturally out
of the present state of things. Now,
our schoolless art, like what has once
been a mighty river, with all its tributary
streams, has wandered into[152]
strange and lower lands, and been enticed
away through innumerable small
channels, still fertilising, in a more
homely and modest way, many
countries, but losing its own distinctive
character and name. The streams
will never flow back and unite again,
but some of them, in this earth’s shifts
and changes, may again become rivers,
and bear a rich merchandise into the
large ocean, and so enrich the world.
If we think upon the distinct characteristics
of schools, we must be struck
with this, that before each one was
known, established, and confirmed in
public opinion, it could not have been
generally imagined and preconceived.
It is altogether the creation of gifted
genius. We acknowledge the setting
up a great truth, of which we had not
a glimpse until we see it worked out,
and standing before us manifest. It
is ours by natural adoption, not by a
universal instinctive invention. So
that it is a presumption of our weakness
to believe, as some do, that the
arena of art is limited, and every part
occupied; and that, for the future,
nothing is left but a kind of copying
and imitation. Who is to set limit to
the powers of mind? We can imagine
a dogmatist of this low kind, before
Shakspeare’s day, in admiration of
the Greek drama, laying down the
laws of the unities as irrefragable,
and that the great volume of the
drama was closed with them. And
some such opinions have been set
forth by our Gallic neighbours, and
maintained with no little pertinacity.
We must have been Shakspeares
to have preconceived his drama.
How, for ages, was poetry limited!
the epic, as it were, closed! His age
knew nothing of Milton before Milton.
It was a new principle coming dimly
through troubadours and romances,
that shone forth at length Homerically,
but with a difference, in Marmion,
and indeed all Sir Walter Scott’s
poetry, which, if it be linked to any
that has preceded it, must be referred
to the most remote, to that of Homer
himself; so that let no man say that
the world of fact and possibility is
shut against art. The great classic
idea, the deification, the worship of
beauty, was completed by the ancients.
There was a long rest, a sleep, without
a dream of a new principle; but it
came, and art awakened to its perception.
Giotto, Della Robbo, the old
Siennese school, Beato Angelico,
Pisani, Donatello, evolve the Christian
idea. Perugino, weak in faith,
turns art towards earth, and leads
Rafaelle to strive for a new beautiful;
and Michael Angelo for the powerful—the
former humanising the divine, the
latter, if not deifying, gigantising
humanity—not in the antique repose,
but incorporeal energy—the whole
dignity of man, as imagined in his
personal condition. This was the characteristic
of the Florentine school—as,
after Perugino, or commencing with
him, intellect, united with grace and
beauty, became the characteristic of
the Roman. But grace and beauty
are dangerously human. The religious
mind, in reverential contemplation,
felt awe above humanity, and feared
to invest divinity with corporeal charm.
Even in heathen art, the great Athenian
goddess affects not grace, but
stands in a severe repose, so unlike
rest, the beautiful emblem of weakness.
Grace and beauty became dangerous
qualities when applied to Christian
devotional art. The followers of
Perugino, who thought them essential,
were not at first aware to what degree
they were deteriorating the great
principle of their school, and how they
were rendering art too human for their
creed. Woman—by the gift of nature,
beauty personified—by more close and
accurate study of her perfections,
ceased to be an object of real worship,
as her fascinations were felt. Even
Raffaelle was under an unadoring influence.
His madonnas often detract
much from the idolatry which his
church laboured to confirm. We must
not wonder, then, if after him we find
humanity in woman even dethroned
from her higher and almost majestic
state of heavenly purity—though legitimatised
as an object of worship, the
“mother of God,” in that higher
sanctity than it was possible to set up
man, in his most saintly apotheosis,
(for the boldest mind would necessarily
be shocked at the idea of bestowing
a divine paternity on man, even if his
religion forbade it not.) Woman, in
her real beauty, superseded the ideal;
and, from condescending to represent
inferior saints and conventual devotees,
reassumed at length her more[153]
earthly empire, and threw around
fascinations which rather tended to
dissipate than to encourage religious
sentiment. The divinity of art, which
had deigned to shine with sacred
lustre beneath and through the natural
veil of modesty, indignantly withdrew,
when that veil was rudely cast aside
by the undevotional hands of her not
less skilful but more deteriorated professors.

The Venetian school, with a truly
congenial luxury of colour, evolved
the idea of civil polity, in all its connexions
with religion, with judicature,
with manners, commerce, societies, dignities,
triumphs; a large field, indeed,
but one in which the great civic idea
was the characteristic, running through
every subject. Even the nude, before
considered as most eligible in the display
of art, yielded to civic dress and
gorgeous ornament. What other ideas
remain to be evolved? The world
does not stand still—art may for a
time. We must wait till some genius
awaken us.

There is, we repeat, no modern
school among us; art is pursued to
an extent unprecedented, but without
any fixed serious purpose, in all its
multifarious forms, and with an ability
sufficient to show that some moving
cause is alone wanted. We progress
in skill, in precision and clearness; but
the hand is little directed by the mind.
Our exhibition walls abound with
talent, but are for the most part barren
of genius: and surely this must continue
to be the case, while the public
mind is in its unpoetic, its utilitarian
state, and shall look to art for its passing
charm only as a gentle recreation,
an idle amusement. If there is any
tendency to a school, it is unfortunately
to one which is most in opposition
to that pure school which found,
and cherished, and idealised the sanctity
of female beauty.

We know not if it should be considered
an escape or not; but certainly
there was, in the earlier period of
English art, one man of extraordinary
genius, who, vigorously striking out a
great moral idea, might have been the
founder of a new school. We mean
Hogarth. He was, however, too adventurously
new for the age, and left
no successor; nor is even now the
greatness of his genius generally
understood. He has been classed with
“painters of drolls;” yet was he the
most tragic painter this country—we
were about to say, any country—has
produced. We are not prepared to say
it is a school we should wish to have
been established; but we assert that the
genius of Hogarth incurred for us the
danger. His works stand unique in
art—that which can be said, perhaps,
of the works of no other painter that
ever existed, and obtained a name. We
had written so far, when we were willing
to see what a modern writer says of
this great man; and we are happy to find
his views in so great a degree coincide
with our own. We make the follow-extract
from Cleghorn’s 2d volume of
Ancient and Modern Art; a work,
indeed, that, when we took up the pen,
it was our purpose to speak of more
largely, and to which we mean to devote
what further space may be
allowed for this paper:—

“To Hogarth, on the other hand,
M. Passavant awards that justice
which has been denied to him by his
countrymen. Hogarth is of all English
painters, and, perhaps, of all
others, the one who knew how to represent
the events of common life
with the most humour, and, at the
same time, with rare and profound
truth. This truth of character is, however,
visible not only in his conception
of a subject, but is varied throughout
in the form and colour of his figures
in a no less masterly manner.” “Hogarth
[continues Mr Cleghorn] stands
alone as an artist, having had no predecessors,
rivals, nor successors. He
is the more interesting, too, as being
the first native English artist of celebrity.
Yet a tasteless public was
unable to appreciate his merits; and
he was driven to the necessity of
raffling his pictures for small sums,
which only partially succeeded. In
spite of the sneers of Horace Walpole
that he was “more a writer of comedy
with his pencil than a painter,” and
the epigrammatic saying of Augustus
Von Schlegel, that ‘he painted ugliness,
wrote on beauty, and was a
thorough bad painter,’ he was a great
and original artist, both painter and
engraver, whose works, coming home to
every man’s understanding and feelings,
and applicable to every age and
country, can never lose their relish[154]
and interest. They are chiefly known
to the public by his etchings and
engravings, which, however, convey
a very imperfect idea of the beauty
and expression of the original paintings.”
We only object to stress laid
upon his humour, which is not his, or
at least his only, characteristic. He was
a great dramatist of human life; humour
was the incidental gift, tragedy
the more essential. Who had more
humour, more wit than Shakspeare,
and who was ever so tragic, or so
employed his humour as to set it
beside his most tragic scenes, with an
effect that made the pathos deeper?
In such a sense was Hogarth “comic.”
His “Marriage à la Mode” is the
deepest of tragedies.

We turn to Mr Cleghorn’s two interesting
and very useful volumes.
They give a compendious, yet, for general
use and information, sufficiently
elaborate view of architecture, sculpture,
and painting, from their very
origin to their present condition.
We know of no work containing so
complete a view. If we are disposed
at all to quarrel with his plan, it is
that in every branch he comes down
to too late a time. And as it is always
the case with writers who find themselves
committed to the present age,
he evidently finds himself encumbered
with the detail which this part of his
plan has forced upon him. In matter
it will be often found that the present
age overpowers all preceding, when
even it is vastly inferior in importance.
Nor is it very easy to avoid a
bias in speaking of contemporaries;
nor can a writer safely depend upon
his own judgment when he looks too
nearly and intimately on men and their
works, and fears the giving offence
by omissions, or by too qualified
praise. His divisions into schools,
with general remarks on each at the
end, give a very clear view, when
taken together, of the history of these
arts; and we are rejoiced to see them—architecture,
sculpture, and painting—thus
in a manner linked in history,
as they were formerly in the minds and
genius of the greatest men. In this
he follows the good course led by
Vasari. In his account of the Flemish
and Dutch schools, there is a strange
omission of the early Flemish painters
preceding and subsequent to the Van
Eycks, to the time of Rubens; nor is
the influence which the brothers Van
Eyck had upon art sufficiently discussed.
We propose at some future
day to treat more at length on this
subject, and to make extracts from
Michiel’s very interesting little volume,
his “Peintres Brugeois.” Even in the
short account of Van Eyck’s invention,
Mr Cleghorn is somewhat careless, in
the omission of one important little
word, sue, in his extract from Vasari,
who does not exactly describe the
invention as “the result of a mixture
or vehicle composed of linseed oil or
nut oil, boiled up with other mixtures,”
but “with other mixtures of his own.”
Vasari says, “e aggiuntevi altre sue
misture fece la vernice,” &c.

In the following remarks on Greek
sculpture we find something consonant
to the ideas we have ventured to
express:—

“A remarkable difference is observable
in the female ideal, the result of
that refined delicacy and purity of
taste evinced on all occasions by the
Greeks. They neither increased the
stature, nor heightened the contours
of their heroines and goddesses, convinced
that in so doing they must
have sensibly impaired the beauty,
modesty, and delicacy of the sex.
In this the Greek sculptors conformed
to the rule inculcated by Aristotle,
and uniformly observed in the Greek
tragedy, never to make woman overstep
the modesty of the female character.
The Medicean Venus is but a
woman, though perhaps more beautiful
than ever woman appeared on
earth. Another peculiarity is very
striking. While a great proportion
of the male statues, whether men,
heroes, or gods, were naked, or nearly
so, those of the other sex, with the
exception of the Venuses, Graces, and
Hours, were uniformly draped from
head to foot. Even the three Graces
by Socrates, described by Pausanias
as decorating the entrance to the
Acropolis, were clothed in imitation of
the more ancient Graces.” As to this
exception of the Venuses and Graces,
Mr Cleghorn seems to have in some
degree misapprehended the passage
relating thereto in Pausanias, who
distinctly says that he knows not who
first sculptured or painted them naked,
but it was after the time of Socrates.[155]
These Graces of Socrates, by the bye,
may be the φιλαι, of whom he speaks
in his dialogue with Theodota, who,
he says, will not let him rest day nor
night.

The number of nude Venuses would,
it may be suspected, scarcely justify
the elegant compliment in the epigram
in the Anthologia—

Our author censures the school of
Bernini, we should have thought
justly, remembering much that has
been said on the subject of the unfitness
of the ponderous material to
represent light action, if we had not
seen the Xanthian marbles brought
to this country by Sir Charles Fellowes,
and now deposited in the British
Museum. The female statues
that stood in the Tomb Temple are
exquisite, and perhaps equal to any
Grecian art, yet are they represented
with flying drapery. It is difficult
to make a rule which some bold
genius shall not subvert.

Most authors on art think it necessary
to descant upon liberty, as most
favourable to its advancement. It is
difficult to define what liberty is, so that
every example may be disputed. If
we take the age of Pericles, when the
wonders of Phidias were achieved, we
must not forget that Phidias himself
was treated by the Athenians with
such indignity that he left them, and
deposited his finest work at Corinth.
The republic suspected him of thieving
the gold, and he had the precaution,
knowing his men, to weigh the metal,
and work it so as to be removable.
We must not forget that Pericles, who
fortunately in a manner governed
Athens, was obliged to plead on his
knees for the life of Aspasia, whose
offence was her superior endowments.
When Alexander subjugated Greece,
art still flourished. Nor was it crushed
even in the wars and revolts and subjugations
by Cassander, after the death
of Alexander. We should not say
that the Augustan age was exactly
the age of liberty, but it was the age
of literature. The easier solution may
be, “Sint Mæcenates, non deerunt
Marones.” Munificent patronage will
often raise what that state which
passes under the name of liberty will
often destroy.

“In the most favoured periods of
the fine arts, we find patronage either
dispensed by the sovereign, the state,
or the priesthood; or, if a commonwealth,
by the rulers who had the
revenues at their command. Possessing
taste and knowledge themselves,
and appreciating the importance and
dignity of art, they selected the artists
whom they deemed best fitted for
the purpose. The artists, again, respected
and consulted their patrons,
between whom there reigned a mutual
enthusiasm, good understanding, and
respect. Such were Pericles, Alexander
the Great, Julius Cæsar, Augustus,
Hadrian, Francis I. of France,
Julius II., Lorenzo and Leo X. of the
Medici, the nobles and rulers of the
different Italian cities and commonwealths,
the Roman Catholic church
and clergy, Charles I. of England,
Louis XIV. of France—and in our
own times the late and present kings
of Prussia, the King of Bavaria, Louis
Philippe of France, and—it is gratifying
to add—Queen Victoria and
Prince Albert of Great Britain. But,
indispensable as national patronage
is, it can have no sure or permanent
foundation, unless it be likewise supported
by the aristocracy and wealthy
classes. Instead of emanating, as in
the continental states, from the sovereign
and government, patronage in
Great Britain may be said to have
originated with the middle ranks, and
to have forced its way up to the
higher classes, and even to the government
itself.”

There are interesting yet short
chapters on mosaic, tapestry, and
painted glass; subjects now demanding
no little public attention, coming
again as we are to the taste for decoration.
The ladies of England will be
pleased to find their needle-work so
seriously considered. Happy will it
be if their idleness leads to a better
and employed industry. Due praise
is bestowed upon Miss Linwood,
whose works are ranked with the
Gobelin tapestry. We remember seeing
many years ago an invention that
promised great things—painting, if it
may be so called, in wool work. It[156]
was the invention of Miss Thompson,
and was exhibited, and we believe
not quite fairly—much mischief having
been done to the pictures by pulling
out parts, either for wanton mutilation,
or to see the manner of the working.
Whether from disgust arising from this
circumstance, or at the little encouragement
shown to it, the invention
seems to have dropped. Yet was the
effect most powerful, more to the life
than any picture, in whatever material;
and from the size of the works produced
by the hands of one person, we
should judge that it is capable of rapid
execution. We have a vivid recollection
of a copy from a picture by Northcote,
figures size of life, and of the
head of Govartius, in the National Gallery.
We are not without hope that
this slight notice may recall a very
effective mode of copying, at least, if
not of producing, original works.

Of painted glass, it is remarked,—

“The earliest notice of its existence
is in the age of Pope Leo III., about
the year 800. It did not, however,
come into general use till the lapse of
some centuries. The earliest specimens
differ entirely from those of a
later date, being composed of small
pieces stained with colour during the
process of manufacture, and thus forming
a species of patchwork, or rude
mosaic, joined together with lead, after
being cut into the proper shapes.” Mr
Cleghorn omits to say that this more
perfect invention of painting on one
piece various tints and colours, and regulating
gradations of burning, was effected
and brought to perfection by
the same extraordinary man to whom
the world is indebted for the invention
of oil painting, Van Eyck. From the
discoveries of this extraordinary man,
or rather these extraordinary brothers,
Van Eyck, must be dated the advance
in the arts, both on glass and in oil-colours,
which brought to both the
perfection of colouring.

The wonderful splendour added to
design upon glass, which was so eminently
practised at Venice, without
doubt supplied to the Venetian school
an aim which it could not have had
under the old tempera system, but
which the new oil invention of Van
Eyck sufficiently placed within its
reach.

Yet, in one view, we may hence
date the corruption of art. The severity
of fresco was superseded by
the new fascination, and somewhat of
dignity was lost as beauty was more
decidedly established. As very much
of the splendour of glass painting was
thus introduced in oil, the greater facility
of more correctly representing
nature, and embodying ideas by degrees
of opacity, so gave the preference
to oil-painting, that not only the
old tempera and fresco were soon
neglected, but painting on glass itself,
as if it had done its work, and transferred
its peculiar beauty, lost much
of its repute, and, in no very long time,
the processes to which it owed its former
glory.

Mr Cleghorn remarks—”Within a
few years it has been much cultivated
in Great Britain; and the intended
application to the decoration of the
Houses of Parliament will materially
conduce to its improvement and extension.”
It is unquestionably an art
of the greatest importance in decoration.
It has a charm peculiarly its
own. It dignifies, it solemnises by its
own light, and is capable of affecting
the mind so as particularly to predispose
it to the purposes of architecture.
It encloses a sanctuary, excluding the
very atmosphere of the outer world.
There is the impression and the awe
of truth under the searching and embracing
light, that should make the
utterance of a falsehood the more mean,
even sacrilegious. The art that can
have this power, nor is this its only,
though its greater power, is surely to
be cultivated and encouraged extensively.
There is now more attention
paid to the architecture and decoration
of our churches, and a taste has sprung
up for monumental windows. We
cannot resist, therefore, the temptation
to offer a few remarks upon the subject,
now that so many mistaken views
are taken as to the proper application
of this beautiful art.

There seems to be a false idea
abroad that the painted window is to
be predominant, not assistant to the
general impression which the architecture
intends. In reality it loses, not
gains, power by setting up for itself.
And, even in colours, it is not to vie
with shop display of colours “by the
piece,” nor to set forth all its powers
at once in a full glare and blaze, and[157]
too often without other object and
meaning than to display flags of strong
unmixed colours. A painted window
should be a whole, and have no one
colour predominant, but be of infinite
depths and degrees of tint and tone
with one tendency. Nor should it
aim at picture-making, however it
may be adapted to the emblematical.
It should never affect the absolutely
real—the picture illusion: it is altogether
of a world of thought and imagination
belonging rather to the inner
mind of the spectator than to his ordinary
thought or vision. The very
difficulty of the early manufacture was
an advantage to it, for great brilliancy
has resulted from the crossings and
hatchings of the leaden fastenings;
and now that we are enabled to hang
up, as it were, flags of colour, the
effect of those subduing subdivisions
is gone.

There is such a thing, so to speak, as
the genius of a material. That genius,
in the case of glass-painting, is not for
picture. Surely Sir Joshua Reynolds
made a great mistake when, in his window
for New College, he designed, as
for canvass, a picture, and that for the
most part without colour, which the
genius of the material required. Nor by
the largeness of his figures, and of the
whole as a design, did he assist, or
indeed at all agree with, the character
of the architecture. In such instances
many and small parts should make
one whole, both for the advantage of
the real magnitude of the particular
work, and that the magnitude of the architecture
be not lessened—a method,
indeed, which the Gothic architecture
studiously followed, in which even
minute design and detail give largeness
to all the leading lines. Daylight
is never to be seen—an imaginary
light is the all in all. In this respect
it should be like a precious stone,
which is best seen in all its infinite
depths, in shade, out of all common
glare. In the best specimens of old
glass-painting the positive and strong
colours were few, and in small spaces,
and adjoining them was a frequent
aiming at those which were almost
opaque,—even black and greens,
browns and purples, bordering on
black. And if emblematic subjects
were represented, they were in many
compartments, as if the window were
a large history-book with its many
pages—a world of curious emblems,
no one obtrusive. It is bad taste to
fill up a whole window with even
Raffaelle’s Transfiguration; either a
picture or a large design is out of
place, and dissonant to the genius of
the art. One of the worst specimens
of painted window is that in the
Temple, all self-glorifying, painted as
a savage would paint himself, in flags
of colour as crude as possible. The
genius of the art is for innumerable
subdivisions, none obtruding, lest
there be no whole. It should be of
the light of a brighter world subduing
itself, veiling its glory, and diffusing
itself in mystic communication with
the inner mind; and like that mind,
one in feeling with all its varied depths
of thought. Colour and transparency
are the means of this beautiful art;
but these, as they are very powerful
require great judgment and determination
of purpose in the use. The
interwoven gold in the old tapestries
was more effectually to separate the
character of the material from the too
close imitation of nature or the picture;
so on the transparent material of
glass, the crossing, and sometimes
quaintly formed lead lines, always
marked, answer the same purpose.
Mr Cleghorn is too sparing of remarks
and information on the art of painting
on glass, which we the less regret, as
we are shortly to have before the
public the carefully gathered knowledge
upon this subject from the pen
and research of Mrs Merrifield. His
chapter on tapestry is more full and
interesting. We have not seen the
specimens of a new kind invented by
Miss King. It will be a boon to the
public if, in its adoption, it supersedes,
with a better richness, the Berlin
work, at which ladies are now so
unceasingly and so tastelessly employed.
The Art-Union speaks highly
of the invention. It is curious that,
in modern times, a Raffaelle tapestry
should be destroyed to get at the
gold. The anecdote is characteristic
of the equally infidel French of 1798
and of the Jew—excepting that the Jew
was ignorant of its value. Mr Cleghorn
thus speaks of the celebrated
cartoon tapestries—”They were sent
to be woven at Arras, under the superintendence
of Barnard Van Orlay and[158]
Michael Coxes, who had been some
years pupils of Raffaelle. Two sets of
these interesting tapestries were executed;
but the deaths of Raffaelle and
the pontiff, and the intestine troubles,
prevented them being applied to their
intended destination. They were
carried off by the Spaniards during
the sack of Rome in 1526-7, and
restored by the French general, Montmorency.
They were first exhibited
to the public by Paul IV. in front of
the Basilica of St Peter’s, on the festival
of Corpus Domini, and again at
the Beatification: a custom that was
continued throughout part of the last
century, and has again been resumed.
The French took them in 1798, and
sold them to a Jew at Leghorn, who
burned one of them—Christ’s Descent
into Limbus—to extract the gold with
which it was interwoven.“

There is so much information in
these little volumes, that were we to
notice a small part of the passages
which we have marked with the pencil,
we should unduly lengthen this paper,
which we can by no means be allowed
to do. We here pause, intending,
however, shortly to resume the pen on
the subject of art, which now offers so
many points of interest.

KAFFIRLAND.

[8]

It is always with fresh interest that
we address ourselves to the perusal of
books relating to Great Britain’s
colonial possessions. The subject,
daily increasing in importance, has
the strongest claims upon our attention.
In presence of a rapidly augmenting
population, and of the prodigious
progress of steam and machinery,
the question naturally suggests
itself—and more so in England than
in any other country—how employment
and support shall be found for
the additional millions of human
beings with which a few years (judging
of the future from the past) will
throng the surface of a country already
densely and superabundantly populated?
The problem, often discussed,
has not yet been satisfactorily solved.
Without broaching the complicated
question of over-population and its
antidotes, without attempting to decide
when a country is to be deemed
over-populated, we may assert, without
fear of contradiction, that emigration
is the simplest and most direct
remedy for the state of plethora into
which a nation must sooner or later
be brought by a steady annual excess
of births over deaths. It is a remedy
to which more than one European
state will ultimately be compelled to
resort, however alleviation may previously
be sought by temporising and
theoretical nostrums, more palatable,
perhaps, to the patient, but inadequate,
if not wholly inefficacious and charlatanical.
And, after all, emigration is
no such insupportable prescription for
a very ugly malady. Doubtless much
may be said upon the cruelty of making
exile a condition of existence; but
sympathy on this score may also be
carried too far, and degenerate into
drivel. At first sight the decree
appears cruel and tyrannical, until we
investigate its source, and find it to
proceed from no earthly potentate,
but from that omniscient Being whose
intention it never was that men should
crowd together into nooks and corners,
when vast continents and fruitful
islands, untenanted save by beasts of
the field, or by scanty bands of barbarians,
woo to their shores the children
of labour and civilisation. Love
of country, admirable as an incentive
to many virtues, may be pushed beyond
reasonable limits. It is so, we
apprehend, when it prompts men to
pine in penury and idleness upon the
soil that gave them birth, rather than
seek new fields for their industry and[159]
enterprise in uncultivated and vacant
lands. What choice of these is
afforded by England’s vast and magnificent
colonies! The emigrant may
select almost his degree of latitude.
And where Britannia’s banner waves,
and her laws are paramount, and the
honest, kindly Anglo-Saxon tongue is
the language of the land, there surely
needs no great effort of imagination
for a Briton to think himself still at
home, though a thousand leagues of
ocean roll between him and his native
isle.

Excepting that they all more or less
refer to the British possessions at the
Cape of Good Hope, it were difficult
to find three books more distinct from
each other in character than those
whose titles we have assembled at the
foot of last page. An ex-settler, an accomplished
lady, and a shrewd sailor,
have selected the same moment for
the publication of their African experiences.
As in gallantry bound, we
give the precedence to the lady. Mrs
Harriet Ward, wife of a captain of the
91st regiment of foot, is a keen-witted,
high-spirited person; and, like most
of her sex when they espouse a cause,
a warm partisan of the feelings and
opinions of those she loves and admires.
She is an uncompromising
assailant of the system pursued at the
Cape, especially as regards our
treaties with the Kaffirs, whom she
very justly denounces as perfidious,
bloody, and unclean savages, untameable,
she fully believes, and with
whom Whig officials and negotiators
have been ridiculously lenient and
confiding. Although some of her
views are rather sweeping and severe,
she is certainly right in the main.
And we honour her for her heartiness
in denouncing the nauseous humbug of
the pseudo-philanthropists, whose
manœuvres have had a most prejudicial
effect upon our South African possessions,
and have given to persons in
this country notions completely erroneous
concerning the rights and
wrongs of the Kaffir question. But
whilst blaming the administration of
the colony, she finds the country itself
fair and excellent and of great resource.
Herein she differs from her
contemporary, Mr George Nicholson,
junior. This gentleman, lately a settler
at the Cape, cannot be too highly
lauded for the volume with which he
has favoured the public. We are
not quite sure, however, that the
public will think as highly of it as we
do. Our admiration is founded on
the consistency of its tone; upon the
steady, well-sustained grumble kept
up throughout. The preface at once
prepossessed us in favour of what was
to follow. Intended, doubtless, as a
dram of bitters to assist in the digestion
of the subsequent sour repast, it
consists of general depreciation of
other works regarding the Cape, and
especially of one by “a Mr Chase”—of
sneers at “stay-at-home wiseacres”
and hollow theorists—and of a vague
accusation brought against certain
colonial residents of “fomenting the
warlike propensities of the neighbouring
barbarians, to secure their own
ends,” grievously to the detriment and
prejudice of their fellow-colonists.
“The peculiar bent,” says Mr Nicholson,
“of each author’s mind has, in
general, been so far allowed to predominate
as to exclude the hope of
forming a correct estimate of the
capabilities of the soil, climate, and
other interesting features of this extensive
country, by a perusal of their
works.” Could the author of “The
Cape and its Colonists” read his book
with somebody else’s eyes, he would
discover that his own “peculiar bent
has been allowed to predominate,”
and that the consequences have been
of the most gloomy description. Mr
Nicholson is evidently a disappointed,
man. Either by his fault or misfortune,
by the force of circumstances or
his own bad management, his attempt
to establish himself thrivingly at the
Cape resulted unsatisfactorily; and
this sufficiently accounts for the general
tint of blue so conspicuous in his
retrospective sketch of the scene of
his mishaps. The particular spot
where these occurred was a considerable
tract of land (called a farm) in
the district of Graaf Reinet, to arrive
at which he steamed from Cape
Town, where he had landed from
England, to Port Elizabeth in Algoa
Bay. The dismal aspect of this bay
painfully affected him. He “had
read some of the glowing descriptions
given of this part of the country,
by persons whose interest it is to
entice over settlers by any means,[160]
even the most dishonest, in order to
have the benefit of plucking them
afterwards. It is true that I had not
believed the El Dorado stories so current
of this and other colonies, but
my expectations had been raised sufficiently
high to make the disappointment
at the really desolate appearance
of the place, perfect.” The
apparent desolation is accompanied
by substantial disadvantages, which
Mr Nicholson complacently enumerates.
Water is scarce and brackish;
there are no vegetables or fruit within
twenty miles; hardly forage for a
team of oxen; the town is built on
sand, of which unceasing clouds are
hurled by prevalent strong winds
in the face of all comers. No wonder
that the new settler, evidently indisposed
to be easily pleased, made his
escape as quickly as possible from so
dreary a neighbourhood. Shipping
himself, family, and chattels in an
ox-waggon, he joyfully quitted Port
Elizabeth on a splendid morning of
the African autumn—that is to say,
about the end of March or beginning
of April, and set out for his property,
over a road which he describes as a
fair sample of Cape causeways, “nothing
more than a series of parallel
tracks made by the passage of waggons,
from time to time, through the
sand and jungle.” Finding little to
notice on his way, he takes the opportunity
of having a fling at the
missionaries, whom he describes as
doing much harm, although actuated,
as he is willing to believe, by the best
of intentions. The stations serve as
the headquarters of the idlest and
most vagabond portion of the coloured
population, who have only to affect a
Christian disposition to find ready
acceptance and refuge. “No sooner
is a Hottentot, or other coloured servant,
discontented or hopelessly lazy,
than off he flies to the nearest station,
where he can indulge in the greatest
luxury he knows of—that of sleeping
either in the sun or shade as his inclination
may lead him, with the
occasional variation of participating
in the singing and praying exercises
of the regular inhabitants of the
place.” If the zealous propagators
of Christianity, who thus encourage
the natural idleness of the natives,
were successful in their attempts at
conversion, it might be accepted as
some compensation for the temporal
evils and inconvenience they aid to
inflict on a colony where servants are
scarce and bad. But this is far from
being the case. Mr Nicholson assures
us (and we readily believe him) that
it is very rare to find an individual
whose moral conduct has been improved
by a residence at a missionary
station, and that for his part he prefers
the downright heathen to the
imperfect convert. Few of these
coloured Christians have any distinct
idea of the creed they profess; when
able, which is seldom, to answer
questions concerning its first principles,
their replies are parrot-like and
unintelligent. Against the general
character of the missionaries nothing
can be said; but they are throwing
away time, and their employers are
wasting money which might be employed
to far greater advantage in
England, or in other countries whose
inhabitants, equally in want of religious
instruction, are more capable of
receiving and comprehending it than
are the stolid aborigines of the Cape
of Good Hope. Mr Nicholson does
not dwell upon the subject of missionary
labours in Africa, but compresses
at the close of a chapter his
opinions, which are sound and to the
purpose. Mrs Ward says nothing
on the matter, and we ourselves are
not disposed to dilate upon it, having
already often taken occasion
to expose the folly of the system
that sends preachers and biblemongers
to the remotest corners of
the earth when such scope for their
labours exists at home. Let us
return to George Nicholson, his trials
and tribulations.

These were manifold; and he makes
the most of them. No encouraging
signs or omens cheered his progress
through the land, bidding his heart beat
high with hope. At two days’ journey
from Port Elizabeth he halted for the
night at a farm belonging to an Englishman
of independent property, who
received him hospitably, but assured
him that sheep-breeding was a hopeless
speculation, owing to the bad
pasturage, to the bushy tangled
nature of the country, and to the
hyenas, there called wolves, who are
most destructive. As he proceeded,[161]
pasturage improved, but other plagues
were apparent. In some places water
was as scarce as in an Arabian desert,
and as much prized—collected in pits
and husbanded with the utmost care.
“The maps of the colony indicate
rivers of the most encouraging description
in this part of the country.
But the district itself presents only a
series of dry water-courses, leaving
evident traces of their capability of
containing water for some hours after
storms.” These sandy and deceitful
gullies intersect “a frightful country,
which can only be described as a succession
of low undulations, covered
with large shingles, between which the
most debauched-looking stunted tufts
of the poisonous and prickly euphorbia,
with here and there a magnificent
scarlet-headed aloe, forced their way.”
We are at a loss to know what the
ex-colonist here means by the epithet
“debauched-looking,” unless he intends
some obscure allusion to the
thirsty and disreputable aspect of the
brambles, remote as they were from
the vicinity of any water except one
spring of “Harrowgate, which, to
judge from the nasty effluvium it produced,
must have been possessed of
rare healing qualities.” The severe
droughts are the destruction of the
settlers, entailing terrible losses and
often total ruin, and their pernicious
effects are aggravated by flights of
locusts. These the farmers do what
they can to keep off by smoky fires
and other means, sometimes with success;
but even when the insect cloud
pass over a field without ravaging it,
they leave a memento of their transit
in the shape of innumerable eggs. In
due time the young generation come
forth, and being wingless cannot be
driven away, but hop about and
ravage every thing till their wings
grow, and a gale of wind takes them
off to fresh pasturage. Mrs Ward’s
description of a flight of locusts is
remarkably striking, and given with
a vigour of phrase not often found
in the productions of a female pen.

“The first two years of our sojourn
here, the locusts devastated the land.
The prophet Joel describes this dreadful
visitation as ‘like the noise of chariots on
the tops of mountains,’ ‘like the noise of
a flame of fire that devoureth the stubble,’
as ‘a strong people set in battle array;’
and any one who has ridden through a
cloud of locusts must admit the description
to be as true as it is sublime. On
one occasion, at Fort Peddie, the cloud,
flickering between us and the missionary
station, half a mile distant, dazzled our
eyes, and veiled the buildings from our
sight; at last it rose, presenting its effects
in some acres of barren stubble, which
the sun had lit up in all the beauty of
bright green a few hours before. Verily,
the heavens seemed to tremble, and the
sky was darkened by this ‘great army,’
which passed on, ‘every one on his way,’
neither ‘breaking their ranks nor thrusting
one another.’ So they swept on,
occupying a certain space between the
heavens and the earth, and neither
swerving from the path, extending the
mighty phalanx, nor pausing in the
course: the noise of their wings realising
the idea of a ‘flaming blast,’ and their
whole appearance typifying God’s terrible
threat of a ‘besom of destruction.’

“‘They shall walk every one in his
path!’ Nothing turns them from it.
And if the traveller endeavours to force
his way through them with unwonted
rapidity, he is sure to suffer. I have
ridden for miles at a sharp gallop through
their legions, endeavouring to beat them
of with my whip, but all to no purpose!
Nothing turns them aside, and the poor
horses bend down their heads as against
an advancing storm, and make their way
as best they can, snorting and writhing
under the infliction of sharp blows on the
face and eyes, which their riders endeavour
to evade with as little success. You
draw a long breath after escaping from a
charge of locusts; and looking around
you, you exclaim with the prophet, ‘The
land is as the Garden of Eden before
them, and behind them a desolate wilderness;
yea, and nothing shall escape
them!'”[9]

Mr Nicholson’s location included a
tolerable house with mud floors and
reed ceilings, and thirty-five thousand
acres of mountain and plain, having
the reputation of one of the best farms
in the district. The cost of this was
about £2000; and the property was
calculated to maintain five or six
thousand sheep, four hundred oxen,
besides horses. There were four
small springs, allowing the cultivation
of about sixteen acres of good[162]
soil. Mr Nicholson, not wishing to
overburden the land, bought only
three thousand sheep, with cattle in
proportion, and began the life (described
by him as most discouraging
and unprofitable) of a Cape of Good
Hope sheep-farmer. Melancholy indeed
is the account he gives of the
profits and losses of that occupation.
In the first place, high wages and
good keep are scarcely sufficient inducement
to the lazy Hottentots to
take service; and when they are prevailed
upon, they are scarce worth
having. They are sent to the hills
with the flocks, which they have to
protect from beasts of prey, always
on the look-out for a bit of straggling
mutton. They themselves, however,
are conspicuous for their rapacity,
and by no means remarkable for
honesty; and doubtless many a stray
sheep is debited to the hyenas, of
whose disappearance the Hottentots
could give a very good account. The
wild animals, however—panthers,
jackals, hyenas, and, in some districts,
lions—are amongst the settler’s
worst foes. These prowling carnivora
preclude the possibility of leaving
sheep out of doors after dark; and,
even when penned, the fleecy family
can hardly be considered safe. “In
stormy weather,” saith Nicholson,
“my walled pens, although well
bushed at top, and above six feet
high, did not sufficiently protect me
from great losses by the hyenas,
which, on such occasions, would often
jump over and kill sheep, and often
carry one off in their mouths.” This
latter feat is rather astounding; but
no matter, let us pass on to the next
grievances of the unfortunate settler
and sheep-farmer, grievances not peculiar
to himself, but shared by all
whose evil star guides them to the land
of locusts and hyena. The diseases of
sheep are numerous and fatal—scab,
consumptive wasting, inflammation
of the lungs, violent inflammatory epidemics,
poisonous bushes and hailstones,
drought and thunderbolts. “I
recollect one of my neighbours losing
upwards of three hundred valuable
sheep in a few minutes from the effects
of a hailstorm. Another farmer, living
at no great distance from me, lost
fifteen hundred sheep in one season
from drought; and on my own farm,
shortly before I became possessed of
it, four hundred sheep were destroyed
by lightning in a moment.” Doubtless
such mishaps as these do occur,
but there is something particularly
painful in Mr Nicholson’s lugubrious
style of piling them up, without intermixture
of the smallest crumb of
comfort for any unhappy individuals
planning emigration to the Cape.
Did he but vaunt the tender haunches
and juicy saddles, the fine and profitable
wool yielded by the remnant of
these afflicted flocks! But touching
the mutton he is mute; and as regards
the produce of the fleeces, he pledges
himself that, under the most favourable
circumstances, they never yield
more than four per cent on the value
of the flock—a small enough remuneration,
as it appears to us, unlearned,
we confess, in ways of woollen. But
we have not yet got to the worst
of the story. Supposing a farmer
fortunate, and that his flocks escape
the multifarious evils above enumerated—that
they are spared by the
lightning’s blast, the big hailstones,
the inflammatory epidemic, and all
the rest of it. Not upon that account
may he rub his hands in jubilation,
and reckon upon a good clip and high
prices. He gets up one morning and
finds his sheep converted into goats,
or something little better. “Woolled
sheep have a natural tendency to
deterioration in this climate; and in a
few generations, notwithstanding the
greatest care, the wool begins to
show a tendency to assimilate itself
to the hairy nature of the coat, which,
is the natural covering of the indigenous
animal.” So that, upon the
whole, Mr Nicholson inclines to prefer
goats to sheep, as stock, if properly
attended to, and the utmost possible
numbers kept. The profit is made
out of the skin, fat, and flesh, and
“those carcasses not required for food,
might be boiled down for tallow.” He
perhaps overlooks, in this calculation,
“the scarcity and bad quality of the
fuel, composed of the dung dug out of
the sheep pens, and stacked for the
purpose.” The present system, however,
evidently does not answer, judging
from his statement that there is
not “one sheep-farmer in the Eastern
Province (depending on the profits of
his farm) who is either contented with[163]
the results of his farming, or is not
grievously indebted to his storekeeper,
except among the old-established and
primitive Dutch families, who spend
no money in manufactures, and have
but little to spend, had they the habit.”
Is it unfair to argue, from this paragraph,
the absence, on the part of the
English colonists, of that frugal simplicity
of living essential in a new
country? A man settling in a country
like the Cape, should be prepared to
resign not only luxuries, but many
things which in Europe are deemed
positive necessaries of life, but which,
in the forest and prairie, may well be
dispensed with. We infer, from certain
passages in Mr Nicholson’s book,
that he and his fellow-colonists were
rather above their position, too addicted
to the comforts of England to
submit to the privations of Africa, and
that they augmented their expenses
by procuring alleviations which their
primitive Dutch neighbours cheerfully
dispensed with. The Dutchmen, Mr
Nicholson tells us, spend no money in
manufactures. Then the English settlers’
wives were evidently quite out
of their element in the bush, or as occupants
of houses mud-floored and
roofed with reeds. “I have never,”
says Mr Nicholson, “seen an English
woman in the colony, at all raised
above the very poorest, who did not
complain bitterly of the inconvenience
she endured when living on a farm;
and I really know nothing more affecting
than the sight of the often elegant-minded
and well-educated sheep-farmer’s
wife struggling with the
drudgery of her situation, and repining
fruitlessly at the deceptive accounts
which had induced her husband to
seek his fortune in South Africa.”
Here we, perhaps, have a clue to one
cause of the jaundiced view the ex-settler
takes of things at the Cape.
The impossibility of obtaining the requisite
domestic servants drove Mrs
Nicholson from the sheep-farm in
Graaf Reinet to the more agreeable
residence of Cape Town, at a distance
of eight hundred miles; and thenceforward
her husband divided his time,
as best he could, between domestic
and farming duties. This seems an
uncomfortable state of things. The
want of the master’s eye must have
been sadly felt at the farm during his
visits to Cape Town, and he must
have lost much time and some patience
in weary eight-hundred-mile
journeys, performed, for the most
part, on horseback.

The Kaffir war is, of course, a prominent
subject in the three books
before us. We find least of it in that
of Lieutenant Barnard, whose narrative
is chiefly of things at sea, and
most in Mrs Ward’s volumes, which
consist principally of details of that
unsatisfactory contest. Mrs Ward
and Mr Nicholson concur in attributing
to Whig mal-administration,
and to the unwise treaties of Sir
Andries Stockenstrom, the numerous
disasters that of late years have
afflicted the Cape, and the bloody
and inglorious struggle that has cost
this country upwards of three millions
sterling. Here, again, is to be traced
the hand and mischief-making tongue
of the pseudo-philanthropists. By
those tender-hearted gentry was the
original impulse given to the series of
changes which have done so much
towards the ruin of a prosperous
colony. First came a scream about
the ill-treated Hottentots. These
were certainly often ill-used by their
Dutch masters, but that was surely
no reason for emancipating them, by
one summary ordinance, from every
species of restraint. This, however,
was the course adopted; and forthwith
the Hottentot, by nature one of the
most indolent of animals, spurned
work, and took to idleness and dram-drinking.
Since that fatal day, the
race has degenerated and dwindled,
and no doubt it will ultimately become
extinct. Having thus, greatly
to the detriment and inconvenience of
the colonists, procured the Hottentots
liberty, or rather license, the sympathisers
extended their charitable exertions
to Kaffirland. What pretext
existed for this new crusade does not
exactly appear, but its result was
even more mischievous than their interference
with the Hottentots. The
Kaffirs were told of grievances they
previously never had dreamed of, they
were rendered unsettled and dissatisfied,
(greedy and rapacious they
already were,) and at last they poured
into the colony, sweeping off the flocks
and herds, murdering the peaceable
settler, and setting the flaming brand[164]
to his roof-tree. This incursion, the
ruin of thousands, at an end, the colonists
set to work to repair damages,
hoping for peace and a return of prosperity,
when a new calamity came
upon them. Mrs Ward shall describe it.

“Suddenly there was a voice, which
went through all the countries of the
known earth, crying aloud, ‘Let the slave
be free!’ Societies sent forth their ragged
regiments, with banners on which the
negro was depicted as an interesting child
of nature, chained and emaciated, whilst
a ruffian beside him held the lash over
his head. ‘The people’ really imagined
that the sugar plantations were worked
by lanky negroes, handcuffed one to another.
Elderly ladies, who abused their
neighbours over their bohea, rejoiced in
the prospect of ’emancipation and cheap
sugar,’ and the people, the dear ‘people,’
expected to get it for nothing. The Dutch
were quite ready to listen to the voice
that cried ‘shame’ at the idea of seizing
our fellow-creatures, packing them like
herrings in slave-ships, and bartering them
in the market. But how to set about the
remedy should have been considered. The
chain was broken, and the people of England
hurraed to their hearts’ content.
Meanwhile, what became of the slave?
If he was young and vicious, away he
went—he was his own master. He was
free—he had the world before him where
to choose. Whether true or false, he was
persuaded he had been ill used. So,
whilst his portrait, with a broken chain,
sleek limbs, eyes uplifted to heaven, and
hands clasped in speechless gratitude, was
carried about the streets of our manufacturing
towns in England, (where there
was more starvation in one street than
among the whole of the South African
slave population,) the original of the picture
was squatted beside the Kaffir’s fire,
thinking his meal of parched corn but
poor stuff after the palatable dishes he
had been permitted to cook for himself
in the boer’s or tradesman’s kitchen.”[10]

And the frugal, hard-working
Dutchmen, an excellent ingredient in
the population of a young country,
finding themselves deprived of their
slaves, insufficiently compensated, and
in fifty ways prejudiced and inconvenienced
by the clumsy and injudicious
manner in which the emancipation
had been carried out, brooded over the
injustice done them, and began to
migrate across various branches of
Orange river towards the north-east
corner of the colony, and finally beyond
its boundary, preferring constant
warfare with the Kaffirs, entailed
upon them by the change, to
submission to the new and vexatious
ordinances, and to the enactments of
the Stockenstrom treaties. These
were in the highest degree absurd,
although their framer was rewarded
by a pension and title, as if he had
done the state some service, instead
of having actually been the main cause
of the last Kaffir war. A ridiculous
report got abroad, credited largely by
stay-at-home philanthropists, and
heartily laughed at by all who had
any real knowledge of the subject,
that the Kaffirs were a mild, peaceable,
and ill-used people—in Exeter-Hall
phrase, “a pastoral and patriarchal
race.” “It was imagined,” says Mr
Nicholson, “that they possessed a
strong sense of honour and probity,
and only desired to be guaranteed
from the tyranny of the colonists,
(poor lambs!); and a determination
was accordingly come to, to make
treaties with the chiefs, the performance
of which could only be secured
by their honourable observance of
what was detrimental to the interests
of themselves and their people, as they
understood it.” Now the truth of the
matter is, that a more vicious and
treacherous race than the Kaffirs would
be sought in vain upon the face of the
inhabited earth. They unite every
evil quality. “The stalwart Kaffir,”
says Mrs Ward, “with his powerful
form and air of calm dignity, beneath
which are concealed the deepest cunning
and the meanest principles.
Some call the Kaffir brave. He is a
thief, a liar, and a beggar, ready only
to fight in ambush; and although, to
use the common expression, he ‘dies
game,’ his calmness is the result of
sullenness.” Cunning is the most
prominent characteristic of this pleasing
savage. “It makes them,” says
Lieutenant Barnard, “fully aware of
the humanity of the English character,
which prevents us from killing
an unarmed man; so, when they
find themselves taken unawares, they
throw their arms into the bush, pretend
to be friendly Kaffirs, and, in all
probability, fire on our troops when[165]
they get to a convenient distance.”
It also taught them, during the former
war, that they had no chance against
Europeans unless they could procure
firearms; to have time to get these,
they joyfully concluded a treaty, and
would have done so on far less favourable
terms, never intending to abide
by them. But those made were not
sufficiently stringent to keep even
civilised borderers in check. Some
were laughed at, others evaded, whilst
a third class defeated their own object.
Here is the twenty-fourth article, as
a sample of the last-named sort:—”If
any person being in pursuit of criminals
or depredators, or property stolen
by them, shall not overtake or recover
the same before he shall reach the
said line, (colonial boundary;) and
provided he can make oath that he
traced the said criminals, &c., across
a particular spot on said line; that
the property, when stolen, was properly
guarded by an armed herdsman;
that the pursuit was commenced immediately
after such property was
stolen; that, if the robbery was committed
in the night, the property had
been (when stolen) properly secured
in kraals, (folds,) stables, or the like;
and that the pursuit, in such case, was
commenced (at latest) early next
morning, such person shall be at
liberty to proceed direct to the pakati,
(Kaffir police!”) and (we abridge the
verbiage) to make his affidavit and
continue his pursuit, “provided he do
not go armed, or accompanied by armed
British subjects.” Was there ever
any thing more absurd than the
formalities here prescribed for the recovery
of property from a set of cattle-lifters,
in comparison with whom a
Scottish borderer of the olden time
was a man of truth and conscience,
and a respecter of neighbours’ rights?
It explains, if it does not quite justify,
the fierce personal attack made by
Nicholson the sheep-farmer upon the
negotiator of such foolish treaties,
whom he designates pretty plainly,
without positively naming him. Mrs
Ward, too lady-like and well-bred
to descend to personalities—save in
the case of Kaffirs, whom at times she
does most lustily vituperate—contents
herself with blaming acts without
attacking individuals. The wily
Kaffirs, with whom theft is a virtue,
were not slow to discover the facilities
afforded them, and stole cattle to a
greater extent than ever. Persuaded,
moreover, that such regulations could
be prompted only by the weakness of
the framers, they looked forward with
glee to overrunning the entire colony
at their leisure. They only waited
till they should have sufficient muskets
and cartridges. These they easily
obtained; there was no lack of unpatriotic
white traders ready and
willing to supply them. This done,
the warwhoop was raised, and hostilities
recommenced,—the Kaffirs confident
of victory. There had been so
much parleying and lawyers’-work
with them, threats had so often been
uttered and so seldom carried out,
that the savages had formed an immense
idea of their own consequence
and power. Whilst the hollow peace
lasted, their constant and imperious
cry was “Bassila!” Give!—when
the mask of friendship was thrown
aside, they burst into the colony, desolating
in their progress as a swarm
of locusts; and if assailed by the
scanty forces that could at first be
brought against them, they plunged
into the tangled bush, and, with
levelled gun and assegai, shouted
“Izapa!” Come on! From the evidence
of Mrs Ward’s own pages, we
think she hardly does them justice
in classing them with poltroons.
They appear to have made good fight
on many occasions. And if the white
feather be so conspicuous an ornament
in their savage head-dress, on what
ground can she claim such great credit
for the troops that overcame them,
and talk of the war as one “not so
noble in its details as those of the days
of Napoleon, but far more glorious in
its results.” Here she evidently
writes from the heat and impulse of
the moment, as she does in some other
parts of her book. To this we do not
object, but rather prefer it to the cautious
and circumspect manner in which
most writers, especially male ones,
would have extolled the deeds of the
South African army, whose sole opportunities
of distinction were in petty
skirmishes with undisciplined and
naked barbarians. Not that the
Kaffirs could be considered as foes of
the most contemptible class. With a
monkey-like faculty of imitation, they[166]
caught up smatterings of European
tactics. “Day by day,” we quote
Mr Barnard, “they get more expert
in the use of fire-arms, and are observant
of our least movements, that I
have heard officers describe their
throwing out skirmishers as quite
equal to our own manœuvres.” They
also attempt stratagems, often with
success. It is a common trick with
them to ensnare small parties of the
enemy by leaving a few cattle grazing
at the edge of a thicket, in which they
conceal themselves, and when their
opponents approach, issue forth and
assail them. In this manner were
entrapped Captain Gibson and Dr
Howell, of the Rifles, and the Honourable
Mr Chetwynd, who, as new-comers
to the colony, were not up to
the hackneyed decoy. The Kaffirs, on
the other hand, are too cunning to be
often taken unawares, although we
read of a few successful surprises in
Mrs Ward’s chronicle of the campaign.
Colonel Somerset, the gallant commander
of the Cape mounted Rifles, is
the hero of one of these, upon which
Mrs Ward dwells with peculiar complacency.
A small division of troops
had halted to bivouac, when an officer’s
horse ran away, and carried him over
a hill, past a “clump of Kaffirs” six
hundred strong. Reining in with
great difficulty, he dashed back and
made his report. What ensued is
described in appropriate style by our
martial and dashing authoress.

“Colonel Somerset lifted his cap from
his head, gave three hearty cheers and
shouted, ‘Major Gibsone, (7th Dragoon
Guards,) return carbines, draw swords,
charge!’ ‘Hurrah!’ was echoed back;
and on they dashed, dragoons, Cape corps,
burghers, Hottentots, and Fingos. They
found the enemy up and in position. Such
a mêlée! The cavalry dashed through
the phalanx of Kaffirs, and for want of
more cavalry to support them, dashed
back again! A Hottentot soldier, one of
the sturdy Cape corps, having two horses
given him to take care of, charged unarmed,
save his sword, and with a horse
in each hand. There was great slaughter
amongst the enemy…. Such
Kaffirs as could not escape fell down exhausted
and cried for mercy: there was a
great deal of cunning in this,—they would
have stabbed any one who approached
near enough to them to offer a kind word.
They had all had enough, however, of
meeting a combined force of dragoons and
Cape corps, and no doubt the latter tried
to surpass themselves. Those gallant
little Totties are an untiring and determined
band. How little do we know in
England of the courage and smartness of
the Hottentot!”

A very wholesome lesson for the
Kaffirs, two hundred of whom were
killed, and a good many more wounded,
but rather an inglorious victory for
regular cavalry—so, at least, it strikes
us, when we contemplate, in one of
Mrs Ward’s illustrations, a parcel of
naked monsters, more like Mexican
apes than men, howling and capering,
and hurling javelins at an advancing
party of infantry. Any “phalanx”
formed by these uncouth barbarians,
would be, we should think, of a very
loose description, and not likely to
oppose much resistance to the charge
of her Majesty’s 7th Dragoon Guards,
backed by the mounted Rifles, who in
spite of black skin, diminutive stature,
and cucumber shanks, are admitted on
all hands to be very efficient light
cavalry—the best, probably, for warfare
against savages. It were well,
perhaps, to increase their numbers; or
at any rate, if cavalry must be sent
out from England, it were surely advisable
to select it of the lightest description.
Dragoon guards are excellent
in their place, first-rate fellows to
oppose to helmeted Frenchmen or
Germans; but the Cape is by no
means their place, and Kaffirs are not
cuirassiers. It is like hunting weasels
with wolf-hounds; the very size and
power of the dogs impede them in the
pursuit of their noxious and contemptible
prey. There is one point of difference,
however, and by no means in
favour of the dragoons; weasels do
not carry loaded muskets, which Kaffirs
habitually do, firing them off
whenever occasion offers, from behind
bushes, out of wolf-holes, or from any
other sequestered and sheltered position,
where it is impossible for the
heavy six-foot-long dragoon guardsmen
to get at them. Red jackets,
glittering accoutrements, and tall
figures make up a capital mark for
the bullet of a lurking foe; and the
unfortunate warriors go perspiring
through the bush, with the thermometer
at 120° in the shade, cursing
the Kaffirs, but rarely catching them,
their clattering scabbards betraying[167]
their approach, and their lofty helmets
visible, leagues off, to the keen-eyed
savage. Local corps—the native article—are
unquestionably the proper thing
at the Cape; the patient Hottentot
and plucky Fingo bear heat, hunger, and
fatigue far better than the beef-fed
Englishman. “The Hottentot will
smile quietly when there is neither
food nor water, and draw his girdle
of famine[11] tighter round his waist,
and travel on under the sun uncomplainingly.”
The Fingos, when hard
run for rations, sometimes eat the
bullock-hide shields that form part
of their defensive equipment. These
Fingos, by the way, are rather remarkable
fellows. The word Fingo
means slave, and for a long period
the tribe that bore the name were in
worse than Egyptian bondage. They
were the serfs of the pitiless Kaffirs,
until Sir Benjamin de Urban rescued
them. “On the 7th May,” says Sir
James Alexander, in his sketches of
Western Africa, “I witnessed a most
interesting sight, and one which causes
this day to be of immense importance
in the annals of South Africa. It was
no less than the flight of the Fingo
nation, seventeen thousand in number,
from Amakose bondage, guarded by
British troops, and on their way across
the Kei, to find a new country under
British protection.” Although an indolent
race, fond of basking in the
sun, and who will not even hunt until
driven to it by hunger, they fought
bravely during the last war, proving
themselves, in many engagements,
better men than their former taskmasters,
who to this day never speak
of them but as their “dogs.” Fingo
costume, as described by Mrs Ward,
is rather original than civilised. They
ornament their heads with jackals’ tails,
ostrich plumes, beads, wolves’ teeth,
&c. Across their shoulders is the skin
of a beast, around their waist a kilt
of monkey tails, and they bear enormous
shields, on which they sometimes
beat time as on a drum. “They
will lie down on the watch for hours,
and imitate the cries of animals to
attract the attention of the Kaffirs,
who find themselves encountered by
creatures of their own mould, instead
of the wolf or the jackal, as they expected.
Sometimes, on the other
hand, the Kaffirs will encircle the
Fingos, and dance round them, yelling
frightfully—now roaring like a lion,
now hissing like a serpent; but it is
seldom the Kaffirs conquer the Fingos,
unless the latter are inferior in numbers.”
Notwithstanding their monkified
manœuvres, the Fingos have been
found very useful. Nay, the very
Bushmen, (the real aborigines of
South Africa,) of which diminutive
and miserable race specimens were
recently exhibited in England, were
availed of as allies during the war—a
detachment of them, armed with
poisoned arrows, accompanying the
British forces. This may appear rather
derogatory to British humanity, but
all is fair when Kaffirs are the foe. The
cruelties of these savages exceed belief.
Mrs Ward regales us with a few of
their barbarous exploits, and details
the tortures inflicted on the unhappy
wretches who fell into their hands. A
soldier of the 91st regiment, caught
straggling, was flayed alive, the little
children being permitted, by way of
a treat, to assist in tormenting him.
Another was burned to death. We
find no account of quarter ever being
given. And Kaffir impudence equals
Kaffir cruelty. When they found
themselves getting the worst of the
fight, after sustaining a reverse of unusual
severity, they would coolly send
ambassadors to the British to know
“why war was made upon them,”
and to request permission to “plant
their corn” in peace.

“After the affair at Fort Peddie, Stock,
a T’Slambie chief, sent messengers to
complain of our attacks upon him, when he,
too, was ‘sitting still,’ and only wished to
be allowed to ‘watch his father Eno’s
grave!’ Very pathetic indeed! This
would sound most pastoral and poetical
in Exeter Hall. Stock was, no doubt,
‘sitting still’ beside ‘his father’s grave,’
but his people were at work, plundering,
burning, murdering, torturing, and mutilating
the troops and colonists, whilst he[168]
‘sat still’ and approved. He should have
protected that sacred spot, and kept the
neighbourhood of Fort Peddie clear of
marauders.”[12]

Mrs Ward writes like a man. We
mean this in no uncomplimentary
sense; on the contrary. Her clear,
natural, and lively style has a masculine
vigour and concision; her opinions
are bold and decided. To those she
emits upon the subject of the colony
and its prospects, we are inclined to
attach considerable weight. Women
are keen observers, and Mrs Ward is
evidently no ordinary woman, but a
person of great energy and penetration.
We more willingly rely on the observations
made during her marches and
countermarches, in her equestrian
rambles and at outquarters, than on the
croaking experiences of our friend the
sheep-farmer. A soldier’s daughter
and wife—a life of change, hardship,
and danger, has quickened her perceptions
and ripened her judgment.

“When I read the miserable account
from Ireland of its past year’s woe, and
the wretched prospect for the next, I long
to hear of ships making their way to
Algoa Bay, with emigrants from that
country. Some have arrived within the
last few weeks, and employment and provision
have been met with at once. Under
another system, affording protection to the
settler, this country will afford a refuge to
the starving population of Ireland. Well
might Sir Henry Pottinger be struck with
the capabilities and resources of this fine
colony, as he travelled through it. Here
is a vast and fertile space, comparatively
free, at this moment, from the murderous
heathen…. An industrious population,
located in sections, would be the
best protection for the country; and a
well-organised militia, or police force,
might be formed from those who are likely
to die of cold and famine at home. Until
such locations can be established, more
troops will be required; the country we
have added to our possessions must be
held by might, and to do this, a living
wall, bristling with arms, is necessary.

“The village of Bathurst, in the district
of Lower Albany, may be said to defend
itself to its best ability. This pretty
settlement has risen and flourished under
the patient labour of emigrants, sent
thither in 1820, chiefly through the instrumentality
of the Duke of Newcastle.
The labourer, the mechanic, the unthriving
tradesman, the servant without work,
may not only find employment, but are
absolutely wanted here. The former may
plant his three, and sometimes four crops
of potatoes in the year, to say nothing of
other produce, and manifold resources of
gain and comfort. It is singular that,
whilst our fellow creatures in Great
Britain, in 1847, were suffering from the
failure of their crops, the gardens of corn,
pumpkin, &c., in Kaffirland, were more
than usually productive.

“The miserable mechanics from our
crowded manufacturing districts may here
earn six shillings a-day with ease; the
ruined tradesman of England, with a jail
staring him in the face, will meet a welcome
here, where opposition in trade is
required, to promote industry, honesty, and
civility; and the youths of Ireland, instead
of arming themselves for rebellious purposes,
may, in this colony, serve their
Queen honourably, by protecting their
fellow creatures from the aggressions of
the savage.”[13]

Favourable and encouraging accounts,
contrasting strongly with Mr
Nicholson’s melancholy reports! That
gentleman’s book, if read and credited,
is of itself enough to stop emigration
to the country whither Mrs Ward
thus strongly advocates it. And we
must bear in mind, moreover, that the
colonial districts of the Cape include
the least fertile and valuable portion
of South Africa. The finest pastures
and most healthy tracts are held
by Hottentots, Kaffirs, and Fingos.
Savages, experience teaches us, recede
and dwindle on the advance of the
white man. Increase the population
of the Cape Colony, and in due time
the colonists will push their way.
But Mr Nicholson strongly objects to
such increase, and holds it unwise and
impracticable. We cannot repeat,
even in a compressed form, all the
gloomy statements of his eighth chapter,
but will just glance at one or two
of its points. In the first place, in
the country which, as Mrs Ward
maintains, would receive “the starving
population of Ireland,” and be the
better for their arrival, so long as they
were willing to work, Mr Nicholson
can only make room for one thousand
of the humbler classes of emigrants.[169]
This, he opines, “would be the greatest
number who could obtain employment
suited to the capacities and habits of
decent labouring people.” They are
to be principally female house-servants,
cooks, housemaids, and nurses;
and with respect to the few out-door
labourers he is disposed to admit,
those, he tells us, “would succeed
best who, without having previously
followed any particular occupation so
closely as to be almost unfitted for any
other, can, as the term is, ‘turn their
hands to any thing.'” Married men,
in his opinion, should not go out at
all. These are certainly singular
doctrines, rather contrary to received
notions concerning emigration, as well
as to Mrs Ward’s opinions. As to
persons of a superior class going out
to take farms, expecting to live upon
their produce, Mr Nicholson treats the
idea as utterly visionary and chimerical.
Such persons must possess an
independent income, in addition to
what it may be necessary to invest in
a farm. The question then is, how do
the Dutch manage? since the “late
resident” admits the superior success
and contentedness found amongst the
Boërs, and which were far more evident
before the wealthiest and most
intelligent of them had left the colony,
to seek at Port Natal refuge from
foolish legislation, and from the slave-emancipating
absurdities of the philanthropists.
May not an answer be
found in the following extract?—”It
must be admitted that a British population
is of more intrinsic value than
a colonial Dutch one; but then the
latter has, by long experience, been
taught to moderate hopes and necessities
within a compass little in accordance
with the go-a-head notions of the
present race of Englishmen of all
classes of society.” Of course if “fast
men” go out to settle at the Cape,
with Captain Harris’s book of South
African sports and a case of rifles and
fowling-pieces for chief baggage, and
with expectations of finding in the
bush grand-pianos for their wives,
and rocking-horses for their first-born,
they are likely to be exceedingly discontented
on discovering hard work
and many privations to be the necessary
conditions of life in a new country.
But Mr Nicholson is evidently
not one of those easily-pleased persons,
who put up with present disagreeables
in hopes of a more prosperous future.
To be sure, he denies the possibility
of any amount of energy, knowledge,
and industry procuring the emigrant
a settled and comfortable position.
“When all this energy must be expended
in an often vain effort to prevent
loss, or to overcome difficulties,
the control of which will only have a
conservative, and not a progressive
effect on the settler’s circumstances,
its constant exercise soon sickens,
and the consequences will be despair
and misery.” We should put more
faith in these deplorable accounts, were
they supported by the evidence of
other writers on the subject; but we
know of none who partake Mr Nicholson’s
dismal views, at least to any
thing like the same extent. And his
whole book breathes a spirit of discontent
and depreciation that makes
us regard it with distrust, as the
splenetic effusion of a man soured by
ill success. With him, from Dan to
Beersheba, all is barren; or, if exceptional
fertility here and there prevails,
it is neutralised by an accumulation
of evils.

“The farmer is, in this country, always
checkmated, as it were, by the
natural order of things: luxuriant-looking
pasturage is of poisonous quality, and
the more wholesome kinds scanty in
quantity, and liable to be fatally diminished
by dry seasons. Crops of corn
and all kinds of vegetables grow most
abundantly, and are cultivated at but
little expense, in most parts of Albany;
frequent and heavy losses in wheat crops,
however, may be expected from the
‘rust,’ and less frequent and more partial
destruction from the attacks of locusts.
When a large general yield of grain
occurs, it must be sold at a very low
figure, as there is great difficulty in preserving
it for better prices, for want of
granaries and barns, which would be too
expensive to erect, and would, after all,
but ineffectually guarantee it from the
attacks of the numerous animals and
insects which swarm in this climate. If
sold for a good price in such a season, to
persons inhabiting other districts where
the crops may have failed, the expenses
of transport would form a serious item
of deduction from the general profit.”[14]

[170]

May we be a breakfast for hippopotami,
if there is a possibility of
pleasing George Nicholson, junior,
Esq.! Here is a catalogue of calamities!
How he baffles the unfortunate
settler at every turn with some fresh
and inevitable disaster! When grass
abounds, it is poisonous, and, when
wholesome, there is none of it! The
rust and the locust conspire to destroy
the wheat: when it escapes both, it
must be sold for next to nothing, because
it is not worth while building
barns to store it. And if a Cape
farmer were extravagant enough to
build a granary, insects and animals
would empty it for him! Insects,
animals, and reptiles certainly are the
curse of the country—certain descriptions
of them, at least. Snakes are
very abundant, and nearly all deadly
in their bite. In the fertile district of
Zwellendam they abound, and frequently
occasion severe loss by biting
the sheep. Amongst the beasts of
prey, lions are getting thinned by the
guns of Boërs, settlers, and English
officers; the jackals and hyenas are
cowardly creatures, and fly from man,
but play the mischief with the flocks.
The rhinoceros is an ugly customer
when provoked, but far less so than
he would be were his sight better,
and his difficulty in turning his stiff
carcass less. The lumbering hippopotamus
abounds in most of the
rivers, and is shot from the banks by
huntsmen hidden amongst the bushes;
he is sometimes also taken in pitfalls,
with a sharp stake at the bottom,
which impales any unfortunate animal
chancing to fall in. His teeth are
more valuable than elephant ivory,
and his flesh—especially the fat,
which, when salted, eats like bacon—is
greatly esteemed by both colonists
and natives. The plains are in some
places infested by colonies of small
animals, rather larger than the squirrel,
and obnoxious to the horseman,
“who form a kind of warren in the
softer and more sandy portions of the
plain, which break in with the horse,
and bury him up to his shoulders in
the dust and rubbish, amongst which
the rider is pretty sure of finding himself
on his back.” But if dangerous
beasts and troublesome vermin are
too plentiful in the colony, this annoyance
is compensated by an extraordinary
abundance of useful and
profitable animals. Numerous varieties
of the stag and antelope overrun
the plains. Mr Nicholson, whom we
suspect of a more decided predilection
for the sportsman’s double-barrel than
for the crook and tar-barrel of the
sheep-farmer, speaks in the highest
terms of field-sports at the Cape, although,
faithful to his system of flying
off from a subject almost as soon as he
touches upon it, he gives few details,
hinting diffidence in approaching that
subject after Harris’s famous book.
The little he does say impresses us
with the idea of a glorious supply of
venison and other choice meats. We
read of twenty thousand antelopes in
sight at one time; of a column of
spring-bucks (a variety of the same
family) fifteen miles in length, and so
closely packed, that nine fell at one
discharge from a large gun. The
extensive forest of the Zitikama,
which supplies the colony with timber,
abounds in buffalo, boar, and
antelope, in pheasants, partridges,
and guinea-fowl. The keen sportsman,
not wedded to the pleasures of
a city, will find abundant pastime
and recreation in so gamy a land as
this; and, when wearied by the monotonous
occupations of his farm, may,
almost without losing sight of browsing
herds and drowsy Hottentots,
pleasantly beguile an hour by stalking
a “blesbok” or circling a bustard—the
latter process consisting in riding
round the birds in large but decreasing
circles, which evolution, if skilfully
performed, causes them to lie close
till the horse walks them up. Such
is the manœuvre advocated and practised
by Mr Nicholson, who, having
at last left off grumbling, and begun
to be amusing, prematurely closes his
very brief volume, as if afraid of
writing himself into good humour on
his favourite subject of sporting, and
of retracting some portion of his previous
depreciation of a colony which,
with due deference for his opinion
and verdict, we persist in considering
a land of great promise to frugal,
hardy, and industrious emigrants.

[171]

THE CAXTONS.—PART V.

CHAPTER XV.

In setting off the next morning, the
Boots, whose heart I had won by an
extra sixpence for calling me betimes,
good-naturedly informed me that I
might save a mile of the journey,
and have a very pleasant walk into
the bargain, if I took the footpath
through a gentleman’s park, the lodge
of which I should see about seven
miles from the town.

“And the grounds are showed too,”
said the Boots, “if so be you has a
mind to stay and see ’em. But don’t
you go to the gardener, he’ll want half-a-crown;
there’s an old ‘oman at the
lodge, who will show you all that’s
worth seeing,—the walks and the big
cascade—for a tizzy. You may make
use o’ my name,” he added proudly,
“Bob, boots at the Lion. She be a
haunt o’ mine, and she minds them
that come from me pertiklerly.”

Not doubting that the purest philanthropy
actuated these counsels, I
thanked my shockheaded friend, and
asked carelessly to whom the park
belonged?

“To Muster Trevanion, the great
parliament man,” answered the Boots.
“You has heard o’ him, I guess,
sir?”

I shook my head, surprised, every
hour, more and more, to find how very
little there was in it.

“They takes in the Moderate Man’s
Journal at the Lamb; and they say
in the tap there that he’s one of the
cleverest chaps in the House o’ Commons,”
continued the Boots in a confidential
whisper. “But we takes in
the People’s Thunderbolt at the Lion,
and we knows better this Muster
Trevanion: he is but a trimmer,—milk
and water,—no horator,—not the
right sort,—you understand?”

Perfectly satisfied that I understood
nothing about it, I smiled, and said,
“Oh yes;” and, slipping on my knapsack,
commenced my adventures;
the Boots bawling after me, “Mind,
sir, you tells haunt I sent you!”

The town was only languidly putting
forth symptoms of returning life,
as I strode through the streets; a pale
sickly unwholesome look on the face
of the slothful Phœbus had succeeded
the feverish hectic of the past
night; the artisans whom I met
glided past me, haggard and dejected;
a few early shops were alone open;
one or two drunken men, emerging
from the lanes, sallied homeward with
broken pipes in their mouths; the
bills stuck on the walls, with large
capitals, calling attention to “Best
family teas at 4s. a-lb.;” “the arrival
of Mr Sloman’s caravan of wild beasts,”
and Dr Do’ems “Paracelsian Pills of
Immortality,” stared out dull and
uncheering from the walls of tenantless
dilapidated houses in that chill
sunrise which favours no illusion. I
was glad when I had left the town
behind me, and saw the reapers in
the corn-fields, and heard the chirp of
the birds. I arrived at the lodge of
which the Boots had spoken: a pretty
rustic building half concealed by a
belt of plantations, with two large
iron gates for the owner’s friends, and
a small turn-stile for the public, who,
by some strange neglect on his part,
or sad want of interest with the neighbouring
magistrates, had still preserved
a right to cross the rich man’s
domains, and look on his grandeur,
limited to compliance with a reasonable
request mildly stated on the
notice-board, “to keep to the paths.”
As it was not yet eight o’clock, I had
plenty of time before me to see the
grounds, and, profiting by the economical
hint of the Boots, I entered the
lodge, and inquired for the old lady
who was haunt to Mr Bob. A young
woman, who was busied in preparing
breakfast, nodded with great civility
to this request, and hastening to a
bundle of clothes which I then perceived
in the corner, she cried, “Grandmother,
here’s a gentleman to see the
cascade.”

The bundle of clothes then turned
round, and exhibited a human countenance,
which lighted up with great
intelligence as the grand-daughter,
turning to me, said with simplicity—”She’s
old, honest cretur, but she
still likes to earn a sixpence, sir;”
and taking a crutch-staff in her hand,[172]
while her grand-daughter put a neat
bonnet on her head, this industrious
gentlewoman sallied out at a pace
which surprised me.

I attempted to enter into conversation
with my guide; but she did not
seem much inclined to be sociable, and
the beauty of the glades and groves
which now spread before my eyes reconciled
me to silence.

I have seen many fine places since
then, but I do not remember to have
seen a landscape more beautiful in its
peculiar English character than that
which I now gazed on. It had none
of the feudal characteristics of ancient
parks, with giant oaks, fantastic pollards,
glens covered with fern, and
deer grouped upon the slopes; on the
contrary, in spite of some fine trees,
chiefly beech, the impression conveyed
was that it was a new place—a made
place. You might see ridges on the
lawns which showed where hedges
had been removed; the pastures were
parcelled out in divisions by new
wire-fences; young plantations, planned
with exquisite taste, but without
the venerable formality of avenues
and quincunxes, by which you know
the parks that date from Elizabeth
and James, diversified the rich extent
of verdure; instead of deer, were
short-horned cattle of the finest breed—sheep
that would have won the prize
at an agricultural show. Every where
there was the evidence of improvement—energy—capital;
but capital
clearly not employed for the mere
purpose of return. The ornamental
was too conspicuously predominant
amidst the lucrative, not to say eloquently—”The
owner is willing to
make the most of his land, but not the
most of his money.”

But the old woman’s eagerness to
earn sixpence had impressed me unfavourably
as to the character of the
master. “Here,” thought I, “are all
the signs of riches; and yet this poor old
woman, living on the very threshold
of opulence, is in want of a sixpence.”

These surmises, in the indulgence
of which I piqued myself on my penetration,
were strengthened into convictions
by the few sentences which I
succeeded at last in eliciting from the
old woman.

“Mr Trevanion must be a rich
man,” said I.

“O ay, rich eno’!” grumbled my
guide.

“And,” said I, surveying the extent
of shrubbery or dressed ground
through which our way wound, now
emerging into lawns and glades, now
belted by rare garden trees, now (as
every inequality of the ground was
turned to advantage in the landscape)
sinking into the dell, now climbing up
the slopes, and now confining the
view to some object of graceful art or
enchanting nature:—”And,” said I,
“he must employ many hands here—plenty
of work, eh!”

“Ay, ay—I don’t say that he don’t
find work for those who want it. But
it aint the same place it wor in my
day.”

“You remember it in other hands,
then?”

“Ay, ay! When the Hogtons had it,
honest folk! My goodman was the
gardener—none of these set-up fine
gentlemen who can’t put hand to a
spade.”

Poor faithful old woman!

I began to hate the unknown proprietor.
Here clearly was some mushroom
usurper who had bought out the
old simple hospitable family, neglected
its ancient servants, left them to earn
tizzies by showing waterfalls, and insulted
their eyes by his selfish wealth.

“There’s the water, all spil’t—it
warn’t so in my day,” said the guide.

A rivulet, whose murmur I had long
heard, now stole suddenly into view,
and gave to the scene the crowning
charm. As, relapsing into silence, we
tracked its silvan course, under dipping
chestnuts and shady limes—the
house itself emerged on the opposite
side—a modern building, of white
stone, with the noblest Corinthian
portico I ever saw in this country.

“A fine house, indeed,” said I.
“Is Mr Trevanion here much?”

“Ay, ay—I don’t mean to say that
he goes away altogether, but it aint as
it wor in my day, when the Hogtons
lived here all the year round in their
warm house, not that one.”

Good old woman, and these poor
banished Hogtons! thought I: hateful
parvenu! I was pleased when
a curve in the shrubberies shut out the
house from view, though in reality
bringing us nearer to it. And the
boasted cascade, whose roar I had[173]
heard for some moments, came in
sight.

Amidst the Alps, such a waterfall
would have been insignificant, but contrasting
ground highly dressed, with
no other bold features, its effect was
striking, and even grand. The banks
were here narrowed and compressed;
rocks, partly natural, partly no doubt
artificial, gave a rough aspect to the
margin; and the cascade fell from a
considerable height into rapid waters,
which my guide mumbled out were
“mortal deep.”

“There wor a madman leapt over
where you be standing,” said the old
woman, “two years ago last June.”

“A madman! why,” said I, observing,
with an eye practised in the
gymnasium of the Hellenic Institute,
the narrow space of the banks over
the gulf which veiled the falls—”Why,
my good lady, it need not be a madman
to perform that leap.”

And so saying, with one of those
sudden impulses which it would be
wrong to ascribe to the noble quality
of courage, I drew back a few steps,
and cleared the abyss. But when,
from the other side, I looked back at
what I had done, and saw that failure
had been death, a sickness came over
me, and I felt as if I would not have
re-leaped the gulf to have become lord
of the domain.

“And how am I to get back?”
said I, in a forlorn voice, to the old
woman, who stood staring at me on
the other side—”Ah, I see there is a
bridge below.”

“But you can’t go over the bridge;
there’s a gate on it; master keeps the
key himself. You are in the private
grounds now. Dear—dear! the
Squire would be so angry if he knew.
You must go back; and they’ll see
you from the house! Dear me! dear—dear!
What shall I do? Can’t you
leap back agin?”

Moved by these piteous exclamations,
and not wishing to subject the
poor old lady to the wrath of a master,
evidently an unfeeling tyrant, I
resolved to pluck up courage and re-leap
the dangerous abyss.

“Oh yes—never fear,” said I, therefore.
“What’s been done once ought
to be done twice, if needful. Just get
out of my way, will you?”

And I receded several paces over a
ground much too rough to favour my
run for a spring. But my heart
knocked against my ribs. I felt that
impulse can do wonders where preparation
fails.

“You had best be quick then,” said
the old woman.

Horrid old woman! I began to
esteem her less. I set my teeth, and
was about to rush on, when a voice
close beside me said—

“Stay, young man; I will let you
through the gate.”

I turned round sharply, and saw
close by my side, in great wonder that
I had not seen him before, a man,
whose homely (but not working)
dress seemed to intimate his station
as that of the head-gardener, of whom
my guide had spoken. He was seated
on a stone under a chestnut-tree, with
an ugly cur at his feet, who snarled at
me as I turned.

“Thank you, my man!” said I joyfully.
“I confess frankly that I was
very much afraid of that leap.”

“Ho! Yet you said what can be
done once can be done twice.”

“I did not say it could be done, but
ought to be done.”

“Humph! that’s better put.”

Here the man rose—the dog came
and smelt my legs; and then, as if
satisfied with my respectability, wagged
the stump of his tail.

I looked across the waterfall for the
old woman, and, to my surprise, saw
her hobbling back as fast as she could.

“Ah!” I said I laughing, “the poor
old thing is afraid you’ll tell her master—for
you’re the head-gardener, I
suppose? But I’m the only person to
blame. Pray say that, if you mention
the circumstance at all;” and I drew
out half-a-crown, which I proffered to
my new conductor.

He put back the money with a low
“Humph!—not amiss.” Then, in a
louder voice, “No occasion to bribe
me, young man; I saw it all.”

“I fear your master is rather hard
to the poor Hogtons’ old servants.”

“Is he? Oh! humph—my master.
Mr Trevanion you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I dare say people say so.
This is the way,” and he led me down
a little glen away from the fall.

Every body must have observed,
that after he has incurred or escaped[174]
a great danger, his spirits rise wonderfully—he
is in a state of pleasing
excitement. So it was with me. I
talked to the gardener à cœur ouvert,
as the French say: and I did not
observe that his short monosyllables
in rejoinder all served to draw out
my little history—my journey, its
destination; my schooling under Dr
Herman, and my father’s great book.
I was only made somewhat suddenly
aware of the familiarity that had
sprung up between us, when, just as,
having performed a circuitous meander,
we regained the stream and
stood before an iron gate, set in an
arch of rock-work, my companion said
simply—”And your name, young
gentleman? What’s your name?”

I hesitated a moment; but having
heard that such communications were
usually made by the visitors of show
places, I answered—”Oh! a very
venerable one, if your master is what
they call a bibliomaniac—Caxton.”

“Caxton!” cried the gardener
with some vivacity. “There is a
Cumberland family of that name—”

“That’s mine; and my Uncle
Roland is the head of that family.”

“And you are the son of Augustine
Caxton?”

“I am; you have heard of my dear
father, then?”

“We will not pass by the gate now.
Follow me—this way;” and my guide,
turning abruptly round, strode up a
narrow path, and the house stood a
hundred yards before me ere I had
recovered my surprise.

“Pardon me,” said I; “but where
are we going, my good friend?”

“Good friend—good friend! Well
said, sir. You are going amongst
good friends. I was at college with
your father. I loved him well. I
knew a little of your uncle too. My
name is Trevanion.”

Blind young fool that I was! The
moment my guide told his name, I was
struck with amazement at my unaccountable
mistake. The small, insignificant
figure took instant dignity;
the homely dress, of rough, dark broadcloth,
was the natural and becoming
deshabille of a country gentleman in
his own demesnes. Even the ugly
cur became a Scotch terrier of the
rarest breed.

My guide smiled good-naturedly at
my stupor; and patting me on the
shoulder, said—

“It is the gardener you must apologise
to, not me. He is a very handsome
fellow, six feet high.”

I had not found my tongue before
we had ascended a broad flight of
stairs under the portico; passed a
spacious hall, adorned with statues
and fragrant with large orange-trees;
and, entering a small room, hung with
pictures, in which were arranged all
the appliances for breakfast, my companion
said to a lady, who rose
from behind the tea-urn, “My dear
Ellinor—I introduce to you the son of
our old friend Augustine Caxton.
Make him stay with us as long as he
can. Young gentleman, in Lady
Ellinor Trevanion think that you see
one whom you ought to know well—family
friendships should descend.”

“My host” said these last words
in an imposing tone, and then pounced
on a letter-bag on the table, drew
forth an immense heap of letters and
newspapers, threw himself into an
arm-chair, and seemed perfectly forgetful
of my existence.

The lady stood a moment in mute
surprise, and I saw that she changed
colour, from pale to red, and red to
pale, before she came forward with the
enchanting grace of unaffected kindness,
took me by the hand, drew me
to a seat next to her own, and asked
so cordially after my father, my uncle,
my whole family, that in five minutes
I felt myself at home. Lady Ellinor
listened with a smile (though with
moistened eyes, which she wiped every
now and then) to my naïve details. At
length she said—

“Have you never heard your father
speak of me—I mean of us—of the
Trevanions?”

“Never,” said I bluntly; “and
that would puzzle me, only my dear
father, you know, is not a great
talker.”

“Indeed! He was very animated,
when I knew him,” said Lady Ellinor,
and she turned her head and sighed.

At this moment there entered a
young lady, so fresh, so blooming, so
lovely, that every other thought vanished
out of my head at once. She
came in singing, as gay as a bird, and
seeming to my adoring sight quite as
native to the skies.

[175]“Fanny,” said Lady Ellinor,
“shake hands with Mr Caxton, the
son of one whom I have not seen since
I was little older than you, but whom I
remember as if it were but yesterday.”

Miss Fanny blushed and smiled,
and held out her hand with an easy
frankness which I in vain endeavoured
to imitate. During breakfast, Mr
Trevanion continued to read his letters
and glance over the papers, with an
occasional ejaculation of “Pish!”
“Stuff!”—between the intervals in
which he mechanically swallowed his
tea, or some small morsels of dry
toast. Then rising with the suddenness
which characterised his movements,
he stood on his hearth for a
few moments buried in thought; and
now that a large brimmed hat was
removed from his brow, and the
abruptness of his first movement, with
the sedateness of his after pause, arrested
my curious attention, I was
more than ever ashamed of my mistake.
It was a care-worn, eager, and
yet musing countenance, hollow-eyed,
and with deep lines; but it was one of
those faces which take dignity and
refinement from that mental cultivation
which distinguishes the true aristocrat,
viz., the highly educated,
acutely intelligent man. Very handsome
might that face have been in
youth, for the features, though small,
were exquisitely defined; the brow,
partially bald, was noble and massive,
and there was almost feminine
delicacy in the curve of the lip.
The whole expression of the face
was commanding but sad. Often,
as my experience of life increased,
have I thought to trace upon that
expressive visage the history of energetic
ambition curbed by a fastidious
philosophy and a scrupulous conscience;
but then all that I could see
was a vague, dissatisfied melancholy,
which dejected me I knew not why.

Presently he returned to the table,
collected his letters, moved slowly
towards the door, and vanished.

His wife’s eyes followed him tenderly.
Those eyes reminded me of
my mother’s, as, I verily believe, did
all eyes that expressed affection. I
crept nearer to her, and longed to
press the white hand that lay so listless
before me.

“Will you walk out with us?” said
Miss Trevanion, turning to me. I
bowed, and in a few minutes I found
myself alone. While the ladies left
me, for their shawls and bonnets, I took
up the newspapers which Mr Trevanion
had thrown on the table, by way of
something to do. My eye was caught
by his own name; it occurred often,
and in all the papers. There was
contemptuous abuse in one, high
eulogy in another; but one passage,
in a journal that seemed to aim at
impartiality, struck me so much as
to remain in my memory; and I am
sure that I can still quote the sense,
though not the exact words. The
paragraph ran somewhat thus:—

“In the present state of parties,
our contemporaries have not unnaturally
devoted much space to the claims
or demerits of Mr Trevanion. It is
a name that stands unquestionably
high in the House of Commons; but,
as unquestionably, it commands little
sympathy in the country. Mr Trevanion
is essentially and emphatically
a member of parliament. He is
a close and ready debater; he is an
admirable chairman in committees.
Though never in office, his long experience
of public life, his gratuitous
attention to public business, have
ranked him high among those practical
politicians from whom ministers
are selected. A man of spotless
character and excellent intentions, no
doubt, he must be considered; and in
him any cabinet would gain an honest
and a useful member. There
ends all we can say in his praise.
As a speaker, he wants the fire and
enthusiasm which engage the popular
sympathies. He has the ear of
the House, not the heart of the
country. An oracle on subjects of
mere business, in the great questions
of policy he is comparatively a
failure. He never embraces any
party heartily; he never espouses
any question as if wholly in earnest.
The moderation on which he is said
to pique himself, often exhibits itself
in fastidious crotchets, and an attempt
at philosophical originality of
candour, which has long obtained
him the reputation of a trimmer
with his enemies. Such a man circumstances
may throw into temporary
power; but can he command
lasting influence? No: let Mr[176]
Trevanion remain in what nature
and position assign as his proper part,—that
of an upright, independent, able
member of parliament; conciliating
sensible men on both sides, when
party runs into extremes. He is
undone as a cabinet minister. His
scruples would break up any government;
and his want of decision—when,
as in all human affairs, some
errors must be conceded to obtain a
great good—would shipwreck his
own fame.”

I had just got to the end of this
paragraph when the ladies returned.

My hostess observed the newspaper
in my hand, and said, with a constrained
smile, “Some attack on Mr
Trevanion, I suppose?”

“No,” said I, awkwardly; for,
perhaps, the paragraph that appeared
to me so impartial, was the most
galling attack of all. “No, not exactly.”

“I never read the papers now—at
least what are called the leading
articles—it is too painful: and once
they gave me so much pleasure—that
was when the career began, and before
the fame was made.”

Here Lady Ellinor opened the
window which admitted on the lawn,
and in a few moments we were in
that part of the pleasure-grounds
which the family reserved from the
public curiosity. We passed by rare
shrubs and strange flowers, long
ranges of conservatories, in which
bloomed and lived all the marvellous
vegetation of Africa and the Indies.

“Mr Trevanion is fond of flowers?”
said I.

The fair Fanny laughed. “I don’t
think he knows one from another.”

“Nor I either,” said I: “that is,
when I fairly lose sight of a rose or
a hollyhock.”

“The farm will interest you more,”
said Lady Ellinor.

We came to farm buildings recently
erected, and no doubt on the most
improved principle. Lady Ellinor
pointed out to me machines and contrivances,
of the newest fashion, for
abridging labour, and perfecting the
mechanical operations of agriculture.

“Ah, then, Mr Trevanion is fond
of farming.”

The pretty Fanny laughed again.

“My father is one of the great
oracles in agriculture, one of the
great patrons of all its improvements;
but, as for being fond of
farming, I doubt if he knows when
he rides through his own fields.”

We returned to the house; and
Miss Trevanion, whose frank kindness
had already made too deep an impression
upon the youthful heart of
Pisistratus the Second, offered to
show me the picture-gallery. The
collection was confined to the works
of English artists; and Miss Trevanion
pointed out to me the main
attractions of the gallery.

“Well, at least Mr Trevanion is
fond of pictures!”

“Wrong again,” said Fanny, shaking
her arch head. “My father is
said to be an admirable judge; but
he only buys pictures from a sense of
duty—to encourage our own painters—a
picture once bought, I am not
sure that he ever looks at it again!”

“What does he then—” I stopped
short, for I felt my meditated question
was ill-bred.

“What does he like then? you
were about to say. Why, I have
known him, of course, since I could
know any thing; but I have never
yet discovered what my father does
like. No—not even politics, though
he lives for politics alone. You look
puzzled; you will know him better
some day, I hope; but you will never
solve the mystery—what Mr Trevanion
likes.”

“You are wrong,” said Lady
Ellinor, who had followed us into
the room, unheard by us. “I can
tell you what your father does more
than like—what he loves and serves
and illustrates every hour of his noble
life—justice, beneficence, honour,
and his country. A man who loves
these may be excused for indifference
to the last geranium or the newest
plough, or even (though that offends
you more, Fanny) the freshest masterpiece
by Landseer, or the latest
fashion honoured by Miss Trevanion.”

“Mamma!” said Fanny, and the
tears sprang to her eyes.

But Lady Ellinor looked to me
sublime as she spoke, her eyes kindled,
her breast heaved. The wife
taking the husband’s part against the
child, and comprehending so well
what the child felt not, despite its[177]
experience of every day, and what
the world would never know, despite
all the vigilance of its praise and its
blame, was a picture, to my taste,
finer than any in the collection.

Her face softened as she saw the
tears in Fanny’s bright hazel eyes:
she held out her hand, which her
child kissed tenderly, and whispering,
“‘Tis not the giddy word you must
go by, mamma, or there will be
something to forgive every minute,”—glided
from the room.

“Have you a sister?” asked Lady
Ellinor.

“No.”

“And Trevanion has no son,” she
said, mournfully. The blood rushed
to my cheeks. Oh, young fool,
again! We were both silent, when
the door was opened, and Mr Trevanion
entered.

“Humph,” said he, smiling as he
saw me—and his smile was charming,
though rare. “Humph, young sir, I
came to seek for you—I have been
rude, I fear: pardon it—that thought
has only just occurred to me, so I left
my blue books, and my amanuensis
hard at work on them, to ask you to
come out for half-an-hour—just half-an-hour,
it is all I can give you—a
deputation at One! You dine and
sleep here of course?”

“Ah, sir! my mother will be so
uneasy if I am not in town to-night.”

“Pooh!” said the member, “I’ll
send an express.”

“Oh, no indeed; thank you.”

“Why not?”

I hesitated. “You see, sir, that
my father and mother are both new
to London: and, though I am new
too, yet they may want me—I may
be of use.” Lady Ellinor put her
hand on my head, and sleeked down
my hair as I spoke.

“Right, young man, right: you
will do in the world, wrong as
that is. I don’t mean that you’ll
succeed, as the rogues say—that’s
another question; but, if you don’t
rise, you’ll not fall. Now, put on
your hat and come with me; we’ll
walk to the lodge—you will be in time
for a coach.”

I took my leave of Lady Ellinor,
and longed to say something, about
compliments to Miss Fanny; but the
words stuck in my throat, and my
host seemed impatient.

“We must see you soon again!”
said Lady Ellinor kindly, as she
followed us to the door.

Mr Trevanion walked on briskly
and in silence—one hand in his bosom,
the other swinging carelessly a thick
walking-stick.

“But I must go round by the
bridge,” said I, “for I forgot my
knapsack. I put it off when I made
my leap, and the old lady certainly
never took charge of it.”

“Come, then, this way. How old
are you?”

“Seventeen and a half.”

“You know Latin and Greek as
they know them at schools, I suppose.”

“I think I know them pretty well,
sir.”

“Does your father say so?”

“Why, my father is fastidious;
however, he owns that he is satisfied
on the whole.”

“So am I, then. Mathematics?”

“A little.”

“Good.”

Here the conversation dropped for
some time. I had found and restrapped
the knapsack, and we were
near the lodge, when Mr Trevanion
said, abruptly, “Talk, my young
friend: talk, I like to hear you talk—it
refreshes me. Nobody has talked
naturally to me these last ten years.”

The request was a complete damper
to my ingenuous eloquence: I could
not have talked naturally now for
the life of me.

“I made a mistake, I see,” said
my companion, good-humouredly,
noticing my embarrassment. “Here
we are at the lodge. The coach will
be bye in five minutes: you can
spend that time in hearing the
old woman praise the Hogtons
and abuse me. And hark you, sir,
never care three straws for praise
or blame—leather and prunella!
praise and blame are here!” and
he struck his hand upon his breast,
with almost passionate emphasis.
“Take a specimen. These Hogtons
were the bane of the place; uneducated
and miserly; their land a wilderness,
their village, a pig-stye. I
come, with capital and intelligence;
I redeem the soil, I banish pauperism,[178]
I civilise all around me: no merit in
me—I am but a type of capital guided
by education—a machine. And yet
the old woman is not the only one
who will hint to you that the Hogtons
were angels, and myself the
usual antithesis to angels. And what
is more, sir, because that old woman,
who has ten shillings a-week from
me, sets her heart upon earning her
sixpences—and I give her that privileged
luxury—every visitor she
talks with goes away with the idea
that I, the rich Mr Trevanion, let her
starve on what she can pick up from
the sight-seers. Now, does that
signify a jot?

“Good-bye. Tell your father his
old friend must see him; profit by his
calm wisdom: his old friend is a fool
sometimes, and sad at heart. When
you are settled, send me a line to
St James’s Square, to say where you
are.

“Humph! that’s enough.”

Mr Trevanion wrung my hand, and
strode off.

I did not wait for the coach, but
proceeded towards the turn-stile, where
the old woman, (who had either seen,
or scented from a distance, that tizzy
of which I was the impersonation)—

“Hush’d in grim repose, did wait her morning prey.”

My opinions as to her sufferings,
and the virtues of the departed Hogtons,
somewhat modified, I contented
myself with dropping into her open
palm the exact sum virtually agreed
on. But that palm still remained
open, and the fingers of the other
clawed hold of me as I stood, impounded
in the curve of the turn-stile,
like a cork in a patent cork-screw.

“And threepence for Nephy Bob,”
said the old lady.

“Threepence for nephew Bob, and
why?”

“‘Tis his parquisites when he recommends
a gentleman. You would
not have me pay out of my own earnings:
for he will have it, or he’ll ruin
my bizness. Poor folk must be paid
for their trouble.”

Obdurate to this appeal, and mentally
consigning Bob to a master
whose feet would be all the handsomer
for boots, I threaded the stile and
escaped.

Towards evening I reached London.
Who ever saw London for the first
time and was not disappointed? Those
long suburbs melting indefinably away
into the capital, forbid all surprise.
The Gradual is a great disenchanter.
I thought it prudent to take a hackney
coach, and so jolted my way to the
—— hotel. I found my father in a
state of great discomfort in a little
room, which he paced up and down
like a lion new caught in his cage.
My poor mother was full of complaints—for
the first time in her life, I found
her indisputably crossish. It was an
ill time to relate my adventures. I
had enough to do to listen. They
had all day been hunting for lodgings
in vain. My father’s pocket had been
picked of a new India handkerchief.
Primmins, who ought to know London
so well, know nothing about it, and
declared it was turned topsy-turvy,
and all the streets had changed names.
The new silk umbrella, left for five
minutes unguarded in the hall, had
been exchanged for an old gingham
with three holes in it.

It was not till my mother remembered,
that if she did not see herself
that my bed was well aired, I should
certainly lose the use of my limbs,
and therefore disappeared with Primmins
and a pert chambermaid, who
seemed to think we gave more trouble
than we were worth—that I told my
father of my new acquaintance with
Mr Trevanion.

He did not seem to listen to me
till I to got to the name Trevanion. He
then became very pale, and sat down
quietly. “Go on,” said he, observing
I stopped to look at him.

When I had told all, and given him
the kind messages with which I had
been charged by husband and wife,
he smiled faintly; and then, shading his
face with his hand, he seemed to muse,
not cheerfully, perhaps, for I heard
him sigh once or twice.

“And Ellinor,” said he at last,
without looking up. “Lady Ellinor,
I mean—she is very, very——”

“Very what, sir?”

“Very handsome still?”

“Handsome! Yes, handsome, certainly;
but I thought more of her
manner than her face. And then
Fanny, Miss Fanny is so young!”

“Ah!” said my father, murmuring[179]
in Greek the celebrated lines of which
Pope’s translation is familiar to all.

“Well, so they wish to see me. Did
Ellinor, Lady Ellinor say that, or her—her
husband?”

“Her husband certainly—Lady
Ellinor rather implied than said it.”

“We shall see,” said my father.
“Open the window, this room is stifling.”

I opened the window, which looked
on the Strand. The noise—the voices—-the
tramping feet—the rolling
wheels became loudly audible. My
father leant out for some moments,
and I stood by his side. He turned
to me with a serene face. “Every ant
on the hill,” said he, “carries its load,
and its home is but made by the
burdens that it bears. How happy
am I!—how I should bless God! How
light my burden! how secure my
home!”

My mother came in as he ceased.
He went up to her, put his arm round
her waist and kissed her. Such
caresses with him had not lost
their tender charm by custom: my
mother’s brow, before somewhat
ruffled, grew smooth on the instant.
Yet she lifted her eyes to his in soft
surprise. “I was but thinking,” said
my father apologetically—”how much
I owed you, and how much I love
you!”

CHAPTER XV.

And now behold us, three days after
my arrival, settled in all the state and
grandeur of our own house in Russell
Street, Bloomsbury: the library of
the Museum close at hand. My father
spends his mornings in those lata
silentia, wide silences, as Virgil calls
the world beyond the grave. And a
world beyond the grave we may well
call that land of the ghosts, a book
collection.

“Pisistratus,” said my father, one
evening as he arranged his notes before
him, and rubbed his spectacles.
“Pisistratus, a great library is an
awful place! There, are interred all
the remains of men since the Flood.”

“It is a burial-place!” quoth my
Uncle Roland, who had that day
found us out.

“It is an Heraclea!” said my father.

“Please, not such hard words,”
said the Captain, shaking his head.

“Heraclea was the city of necromancers,
in which they raised the
dead. Do I want to speak to Cicero?
I invoke him. Do I want to chat in
the Athenian market place, and hear
news two thousand years old? I
write down my charm on a slip of
paper, and a grave magician calls me
up Aristophanes. And we owe all
this to our ancest——”

“Brother!”

“Ancestors, who wrote books—thank
you.”

Here Roland offered his snuff-box
to my father, who, abhorring snuff,
benignly imbibed a pinch, and sneezed
five times in consequence: an excuse
for Uncle Roland to say, which he
did five times, with great unction,
“God bless you, brother Austin!”

As soon as my father had recovered
himself, he proceeded, with tears in
his eyes, but calm as before the interruption—for
he was of the philosophy
of the Stoics:—

“But it is not that which is awful.
It is the presuming to vie with these
‘spirits elect:’ to say to them, ‘Make
way—I too claim place with the
chosen. I too would confer with the
living, centuries after the death that
consumes my dust. I too’—Ah, Pisistratus!
I wish Uncle Jack had been
at Jericho, before he had brought
me up to London, and placed me
in the midst of those rulers of the
world!”

I was busy, while my father spoke,
in making some pendent shelves for
these “spirits elect;” for my mother,
always provident where my father’s
comforts were concerned, had foreseen
the necessity of some such accommodation
in a hired lodging-house, and
had not only carefully brought up to
town my little box of tools, but gone
out herself that morning to buy the
raw materials. Checking the plane in
its progress over the smooth deal,[180]
“My dear father,” said I, “if at the
Philhellenic Institute I had looked
with as much awe as you do on the
big fellows that had gone before me, I
should have stayed, to all eternity,
the lag of the Infant Division—”

“Pisistratus, you are as great an
agitator as your namesake,” cried my
father, smiling. “And so, a fig for
the big fellows!”

And now my mother entered in her
pretty evening cap, all smiles and
good humour, having just arranged
a room for Uncle Roland, concluded
advantageous negotiations with the
laundress, held high council with Mrs
Primmins on the best mode of defeating
the extortions of London tradesmen;
and, pleased with herself and
all the world, she kissed my father’s
forehead as it bent over his notes;
and came to the tea-table, which only
waited its presiding deity. My Uncle
Roland, with his usual gallantry,
started up, kettle in hand, (our own
urn, for we had one, not being yet
unpacked;) and having performed,
with soldier-like method, the chivalrous
office thus volunteered, he joined
me at my employment, and said—

“There is a better steel for the
hands of a well-born lad than a carpenter’s
plane—”

“Aha! uncle—that depends—”

“Depends! what on?”

“On the use one makes of it.—Peter
the Great was better employed
in making ships than Charles XII.
in cutting throats.”

“Poor Charles XII.!” said my
uncle sighing pathetically—”a very
brave fellow!”

“Pity he did not like the ladies a
little better!”

“No man is perfect!” said my
uncle sententiously. “But seriously,
you are now the male hope of the
family—you are now—” my uncle
stopped, and his face darkened. I
saw that he thought of his son, that
mysterious son! And looking at him
tenderly, I observed that his deep
lines had grown deeper, his iron-gray
hair more gray. There was the trace
of recent suffering on his face; and
though he had not spoken to us a
word of the business on which he had
left us, it required no penetration to
perceive that it had come to no successful
issue.

My uncle resumed—”Time out of
mind, every generation of our house
has given one soldier to his country.
I look round now: only one branch is
budding yet on the old tree; and—”

“Ah! uncle. But what would they
say? Do you think I should not like
to be a soldier? Don’t tempt me!”

My uncle had recourse to his snuff-box;
and at that moment, unfortunately
perhaps for the laurels that
might otherwise have wreathed the
brows of Pisistratus of England, private
conversation was stopped by the
sudden and noisy entrance of Uncle
Jack. No apparition could have been
more unexpected.

“Here I am, my dear friends. How
d’ye do—how are you all? Captain de
Caxton, yours heartily. Yes, I am
released, thank heaven! I have given
up the drudgery of that pitiful provincial
paper. I was not made for it.
An ocean in a teacup! I was indeed—little,
sordid, narrow interests—and I,
whose heart embraces all humanity.
You might as well turn a circle into
an isolated triangle.”

“Isosceles!” said my father, sighing
as he pushed aside his notes, and very
slowly becoming aware of the eloquence
that destroyed all chance of
further progress that night in the great
book. “Isosceles triangle, Jack Tibbets—not
isolated.”

“Isosceles or isolated, it is all one,”
said Uncle Jack, as he rapidly performed
three evolutions, by no means
consistent with his favourite theory
of ‘the greatest happiness of the
greatest number:’—first, he emptied
into the cup which he took from my
mother’s hands, half the thrifty contents
of a London cream-jug; secondly,
he reduced the circle of a muffin,
by the abstraction of two triangles,
to as nearly an isosceles as possible;
and thirdly, striding towards the fire,
lighted in consideration of Captain de
Caxton, and hooking his coat-tails
under his arms, while he sipped his
tea, he permitted another circle peculiar
to humanity wholly to eclipse the
luminary it approached.

“Isolated or isosceles, it is all the
same thing. Man is made for his fellow
creatures. I had long been disgusted
with the interference of those
selfish Squirearchs. Your departure
decided me. I have concluded negotiations[181]
with a London firm of spirit and
capital, and extended views of philanthopy.
On Saturday last I retired
from the service of the oligarchy. I
am now in my true capacity of protector
of the million. My prospectus
is printed—here it is in my pocket.—Another
cup of tea, sister, a little more
cream, and another muffin. Shall I
ring?” Having disembarrassed himself
of his cup and saucer, Uncle Jack then
drew forth from his pocket a damp
sheet of printed paper. In large capitals
stood out “The Anti-Monopoly
Gazette, or Popular Champion.”
He waved it triumphantly before my
father’s eyes.

“Pisistratus”, said my father, “look
here. This is the way your Uncle
Jack now prints his pats of butter.—A
cap of liberty growing out of an
open book! Good! Jack, good! good!”

“It is Jacobinical!” exclaimed the
Captain.

“Very likely,” said my father; “but
knowledge and freedom are the best
devices in the world, to print upon
pats of butter intended for the
market.”

“Pats of butter! I don’t understand,”
said Uncle Jack.

“The less you understand, the better
the butter will sell, Jack,” said
my father, settling back to his notes.

CHAPTER XVI.

Uncle Jack had made up his mind
to lodge with us, and my mother found
some difficulty in inducing him to
comprehend that there was no bed to
spare.

“That’s unlucky,” said he. “I was
no sooner arrived in town than I was
pestered with invitations; but I refused
them all, and kept myself for
you.”

“So kind in you! so like you!” said
my mother; “but you see—”

“Well, then, I must be off and find
a room; don’t fret, you know I can
breakfast and dine with you, all the
same; that is, when my other friends
will let me. I shall be dreadfully persecuted.”
So saying, Uncle Jack re-pocketed
his prospectus, and wished
us good-night.

The clock had struck eleven; my
mother had retired; when my father
looked up from his books, and returned
his spectacles to their case. I had
finished my work, and was seated over
the fire, thinking now of Fanny Trevanion’s
hazel eyes—now, with a heart
that beat as high at the thought, of
campaigns, battle-fields, laurels, and
glory; while, with his arms folded on
his breast and his head drooping,
Uncle Roland gazed into the low
clear embers. My father cast his eyes
round the room, and after surveying
his brother for some moments, he said
almost in a whisper—

“My son has seen the Trevanions.
They remember us, Roland.”

The Captain sprang to his feet, and
began whistling; a habit with him
when he was much disturbed.

“And Trevanion wishes to see us.
Pisistratus promised to give him our
address: shall he do so, Roland?”

“If you like it,” answered the Captain,
in a military attitude, and drawing
himself up till he looked seven feet
high.

“I should like it,” said my father
mildly. “Twenty years since we
met.”

“More than twenty,” said my uncle,
with a stern smile; “and the season
was—the fall of the leaf!”

“Man renews the fibre and material
of his body every seven years,”
said my father; “in three times
seven years he has time to renew the
inner man. Can two passengers in
yonder street be more unlike each
other, than the soul is to the soul
after an interval of twenty years?
Brother, the plough does not pass
over the soil in vain, nor care over
the human heart. New crops change
the character of the land; and the
plough must go deep indeed before
it stirs up the mother-stone.”

“Let us see Trevanion,” cried my
uncle: then, turning to me, he said,
abruptly, “what family has he?”

“One daughter.”

“No son?”

“No.”

“That must vex the poor foolish
ambitious man. Oho! you admire this
Mr Trevanion much, eh? Yes; that
fire of manner, his fine words, and[182]
bold thoughts were made to dazzle
youth.”

“Fine words, my dear uncle!—fire!
I should have said, in hearing Mr
Trevanion, that his style of conversation
was so homely, you would
wonder how he could have won such
fame as a public speaker.”

“Indeed!”

“The plough has passed there,” said
my father.

“But not the plough of care: rich,
famous, Ellinor his wife, and no son!”

“It is because his heart is sometimes
sad, that he would see us.”

Roland stared first at my father,
next at me.

“Then,” quoth my uncle, heartily,
“in God’s name let him come. I
can shake him by the hand, as I
would a brother soldier. Poor Trevanion!
Write to him at once, Sisty.”

I sat down and obeyed. When I
had sealed my letter, I looked up,
and saw that Roland was lighting his
bed candle at my father’s table; and
my father, taking his hand, said something
to him in a low voice. I guessed
it related to his son, for he shook his
head, and answered in a stern hollow
voice, “Renew grief if you please—not
shame. On that subject—silence!”

CHAPTER XVII.

Left to myself in the earlier part of
the day, I wandered, wistful and
lonely, through the vast wilderness of
London. By degrees I familiarised
myself with that populous solitude.
I ceased to pine for the green fields.
That active energy all around, at first
saddening, became soon exhilarating,
and at last contagious. To an industrious
mind nothing is so catching as
industry! I began to grow weary of
my golden holiday of unlaborious
childhood, to sigh for toil, to look
around me for a career. The University,
which I had before anticipated
with pleasure, seemed now to fade into
a dull monastic prospect: after having
trod the streets of London, to wander
through cloisters was to go back in
life. Day by day, my mind grew
sensibly within me; it came out from
the rosy twilight of boyhood—it felt
the doom of Cain, under the broad sun
of man.

Uncle Jack soon became absorbed
in his new speculation for the good of
the human race, and, except at meals,
(whereat, to do him justice, he was
punctual enough, though he did not
keep us in ignorance of the sacrifices he
made, and the invitations he refused,
for our sake,) we seldom saw him.
The Captain, too, generally vanished
after breakfast; seldom dined with
us; and it was often late before he
returned. He had the latch-key of
the house, and let himself in when he
pleased. Sometimes (for his chamber
was next to mine) his step on the
stairs awoke me; and sometimes I
heard him pace his room with perturbed
strides, or fancied that I
caught a low groan. He became
every day more care-worn in appearance,
and every day the hair seemed
more gray. Yet he talked to us all
easily and cheerfully; and I thought
that I was the only one in the house
who perceived the gnawing pangs
over which the stout old Spartan
drew the decorous cloak.

Pity, blended with admiration,
made me curious to learn how these
absent days, that brought nights so
disturbed, were consumed. I felt
that if I could master his secret, I
might win the right both to comfort
and to aid.

I resolved at length, after many
conscientious scruples, to endeavour
to satisfy a curiosity, excused by its
motives.

Accordingly, one morning, after
watching him from the house, I stole
in his track, and followed him at a
distance.

And this was the outline of his day.
He set off at first with a firm stride,
despite his lameness—his gaunt figure
erect, the soldierly chest well thrown
out from the threadbare but speckless
coat. First, he took his way towards
the purlieus of Leicester Square;
several times, to and fro, did he pace
the isthmus that leads from Piccadilly
into that reservoir of foreigners,
and the lanes and courts that start
thence towards St Martin’s. After an
hour or two so passed, the step became
more slow; and often the sleek[183]
napless hat was lifted up, and the
brow wiped. At length he bent his
way towards the two great theatres,
paused before the play-bills, as if deliberating
seriously on the chances of
entertainment they severally proffered,
wandered slowly through the small
streets that surround those temples
of the muse, and finally emerged into
the Strand. There he rested himself
for an hour at a small cook-shop;
and, as I passed the window, and
glanced within, I could see him seated
before the simple dinner, which he
scarcely touched, and poring over the
advertisement columns of the Times.
The Times finished, and a few morsels
distastefully swallowed, the Captain
put down his shilling in silence, received
his pence in exchange, and I had just
time to slip aside as he reappeared at
the threshold. He looked round as
he lingered, but I took care he should
not detect me; and then struck off
towards the more fashionable quarters
of the town. It was now the afternoon,
and, though not yet the season,
the streets swarmed with life. As he
came into Waterloo Place, a slight
figure buttoned up across the breast,
like his own, cantered by on a handsome
bay horse—every eye was on
that figure. Uncle Roland stopped
short, and lifted his hand to his hat;
the rider touched his own with his
fore-finger, and cantered on,—Uncle
Roland turned round and gazed.

“Who,” I asked, of a shop-boy
just before me, who was also staring
with all his eyes—”who is that gentleman
on horseback?”

“Why, the Duke, to be sure,” said
the boy, contemptuously.

“The Duke?”

“Wellington—stu-pid!”

“Thank you,” said I meekly.
Uncle Roland had moved on into
Regent Street, but with a brisker step:
the sight of the old chief had done the
old soldier good. Here again he
paced to and fro; till I, watching him
from the other side the way, was
ready to drop with fatigue, stout
walker though I was. But the Captain’s
day was not half done. He
took out his watch, put it to his ear,
and then, replacing it, passed into
Bond Street, and thence into Hyde
Park. There, evidently wearied out, he
leant against the rails, near the bronze
statue, in an attitude that spoke despondency.
I seated myself on the
grass near the statue and gazed at
him: the park was empty compared
with the streets, but still there were
some equestrian idlers and many foot-loungers.
My uncle’s eye turned
wistfully on each: once or twice, some
gentleman of a military aspect (which
I had already learned to detect)
stopped, looked at him, approached
and spoke; but the Captain seemed as
if ashamed of such greetings. He
answered shortly, and turned again.

The day waned—evening came on—the
Captain again looked at his watch—shook
his head, and made his way
to a bench, where he sat perfectly
motionless; his hat over his brows,
his arms folded; till uprose the moon.
I had tasted nothing since breakfast;
I was famished, but I still kept my
post like an old Roman sentinel.

At length the Captain rose, and re-entered
Piccadilly; but how different his
mien and bearing! languid, stooping,
his chest sunk—his head inclined—his
limbs dragging one after the other,
his lameness painfully perceptible.
What a contrast in the broken invalid
at night, from the stalwart veteran of
the morning!

How I longed to spring forward to
offer my arm! but I did not dare.

The Captain stopped near a cab-stand.
He put his hand in his pocket—he
drew out his purse—he passed his
fingers over the net-work; the purse
slipped again into the pocket, and as
if with a heroic effort, my uncle drew
up his head, and walked on sturdily.

‘Where next?’ thought I. ‘Surely
home! No, he is pitiless.’

The Captain stopped not till he
arrived at one of the small theatres
in the Strand; then he read the bill,
and asked if half-price was begun.
“Just begun,” was the answer, and
the Captain entered. I also took a
ticket and followed. Passing by the
open doors of a refreshment room, I
fortified myself with some biscuits and
soda water. And in another minute,
for the first time in my life I beheld a
play. But the play did not fascinate
me. It was the middle of some jocular
after-piece, roars of laughter resounded
round me. I could detect nothing
to laugh at, and sending my keen eyes
into every corner, I perceived at last,[184]
in the uppermost tier, one face as
saturnine as my own. Eureka! It
was the Captain’s! ‘Why should he
go to a play if he enjoys it so little?’
thought I: ‘better have spent a shilling
on a cab, poor old fellow!’

But soon came smart-looking men,
and still smarter-looking ladies, around
the solitary corner of the poor Captain.
He grew fidgety—he rose—he vanished.
I left my place, and stood without
the box to watch for him. Down
stairs he stumped—I recoiled into the
shade; and after standing a moment
or two, as in doubt, he entered boldly
the refreshment room, or saloon.

Now, since I had left that saloon, it
had become crowded, and I slipped in
unobserved. Strange was it, grotesque,
yet pathetic, to mark the old
soldier in the midst of that gay swarm.
He towered above all like a Homeric
hero, a head taller than the tallest;
and his appearance was so remarkable,
that it invited the instant attention
of the fair. I, in my simplicity,
thought it was the natural tenderness
of that amiable and penetrating sex,
ever quick to detect trouble, and anxious
to relieve it, that induced three
ladies, in silk attire—one having a hat
and plume, the other two with a profusion
of ringlets—to leave a little knot of
gentlemen with whom they were conversing,
and to plant themselves before
my uncle. I advanced through the
press to hear what passed.

“You are looking for some one,
I’m sure,” quoth one familiarly, tapping
his arm with her fan.

The Captain started. “Ma’am,
you are not wrong,” said he.

“Can I do as well?” said one of
those compassionate angels, with heavenly
sweetness.

“You are very kind, I thank you:
no, no, Ma’am,” said the Captain, with
his best bow.

“Do take a glass of negus,” said
another, as her friend gave way to
her. “You seem tired, and so am
I. Here, this way;” and she took
hold of his arm to lead him to the
table. The Captain shook his head
mournfully; and then, as if become
suddenly aware of the nature of the
attention so lavished on him, he looked
down upon these fair Armidas with a
look of such mild reproach—such
sweet compassion—not shaking off
the hand in his chivalrous devotion
to the sex, which extended even to
all its outcasts—that each bold eye fell
abashed. The hand was timidly and
involuntarily withdrawn from the arm,
and my uncle passed his way.

He threaded the crowd, passed out
at the farther door, and I, guessing
his intention, was in waiting for his
steps in the street.

“Now home at last, thank heaven!”
thought I. Mistaken still! My uncle
went first towards that popular haunt,
which I have since discovered is
called “the Shades;” but he soon
re-emerged, and finally he knocked
at the door of a private house, in one
of the streets out of St James’s. It
was opened jealously, and closed as
he entered, leaving me without. What
could this house be? As I stood and
watched, some other men approached,—again
the low single knock,—again
the jealous opening, and the stealthy
entrance.

A policeman passed and repassed
me. “Don’t be tempted, young man,”
said he, looking hard at me: “take
my advice, and go home.”

“What is that house, then?” said
I, with a sort of shudder at this ominous
warning.

“Oh, you know.”

“Not I. I am new to London.”

“It is a hell,” said the policeman—satisfied,
by my frank manner, that I
spoke the truth.

“God bless me,—a what! I could
not have heard you rightly?”

“A hell; a gambling-house!”

“Oh!” and I moved on. Could
Captain Roland, the rigid, the thrifty,
the penurious, be a gambler? The light
broke on me at once; the unhappy
father sought his son! I leant against
the post, and tried hard not to sob.

By-and-by, I heard the door open:
the Captain came out and took the
way homeward. I ran on before, and
got in first, to the inexpressible relief
both of father and mother, who had
not seen me since breakfast, and who
were in equal consternation at my
absence. I submitted to be scolded
with a good grace. “I had been sight-seeing,
and lost my way;” begged
for some supper, and slunk to bed;
and five minutes afterwards the Captain’s
jaded step came wearily up the
stairs.

[185]

MODERN TOURISM.

[15]

The merits of the railroad and the
steam-boat have been prodigiously
vaunted, and we have no desire to depreciate
the advantages of either. No
doubt they carry us from town to
town with greater rapidity than our
fathers ever dreamt of; and instead of
the “High-flyer coach, averaging ten
miles an hour,” whirl us over fifty.
No doubt they are convenient for the
viator who desires to reach America in
a fortnight, or for the Queen’s messenger
who must be in Paris within the
next twelve hours. No doubt they
are first-rate inventions for an elopement,
a fugitive debtor, or a banished
king. But, they have afflicted our
generation with one desperate evil;
they have covered Europe with Tourists,
all pen in hand, all determined
not to let a henroost remain undescribed,
all portfolioed, all handbooked,
all “getting up a Journal,” and all
pouring their busy nothings on the
“reading public,” without compassion
or conscience, at the beginning of the
“season.”

That the ignorant should write ignorantly,
that professional sight-hunters
should go sight-hunting to the
ends of the earth, that minds born
for nothing but scribbling should scribble
to their last drop of ink or blood,
can neither surprise nor irritate; but
that they should publish, is the crime.

If we are told that this is but a
harmless impertinence after all, we
reply—No, it does general mischief; it
spoils all rational travel; it disgusts
all intelligent curiosity; it repels the
student, the philosopher, and the manly
investigator, from subjects which
have been thus trampled into mire by
the hoofs of a whole tribe of travelling
bipeds, who might rejoice to
exchange brains with the animals
which they ride.

No sooner does the year shake off
its robe of snow, and the sun begin to
glimmer again, than the whole tribe
are in motion; no matter where, all
places are alike to their pens—the
North Pole or the Antarctic. One
of them thinks America an unexhausted
subject, and we find her instantly
on board the good ship Columbia,
flying in the teeth of wind and
tide, to caricature New York. Another
puts on her wings for that unknown
spot called Vienna; sends in
her card to nobles and ministers; caricatures
them too; talks of faces which
she had never seen, describes fêtes
to which she would never have
been admitted, and quotes conversations
which she never heard. Another
takes a sweep of the French coast,
and showers us with worn-out romance
and modern vapidity, till we are
sick of the art of printing, and long for
the return of that happy period when
the chief occupations of the fair sex
were cookery and samplers. To all
this, however, there are exceptions;
some of the sex, modest, well-informed,
and capable of informing
others, indulge the world, from time
to time, with works which “it would
not willingly let die.” But our horror
is the professional tourist; the woman
who runs abroad to forage for publication;
reimports her baggage, bursting
with a periodical gathering of nonsense;
and with a freight of folly, at
once empty as air and heavy as lead,
discharges the whole at the heads
of a suffering people.

Miss Martineau, however, deserves
to stand in another category. She is
a lively writer; if she seldom enlightens
the reader of her pages, she seldom
sends him to sleep; she prattles
amusingly; and by the help of Wilkinson
and Lane for the antique, and
her own ear-trumpet and spectacles
for the modern, she makes out of an
Egyptian ramble a very readable
book. And this book is by no means
a superfluity; for, excepting Palestine,
there is no country on earth
which possesses so strong an interest
for the Biblical student; or will, within
a few years, possess so strong an
interest for the whole political world.
France, Russia, and Italy, are probably
at this moment alike speculating
on the changes which threaten
Egypt. The death of Mehemet Ali[186]
cannot be far off. Ibrahim is sickly.
The succession of eastern dynasties is
the reverse of regular; and if by any
chance war were lighted up at one
end of the Mediterranean, it would be
sure to burst out at the other. Egypt
would be the prize of battle. To
England the possession would be of
little value; she has colonies enough,
and she certainly will not be guilty of
the crime of usurpation; but it will be
of first-rate importance to her that
Egypt shall not fall into the hands of
a hostile power; for she cannot suffer
her road to India to be barred up.
Her natural policy would be to see it
restored to the Ottoman. But how
long will the Ottoman himself last?
A Russian fleet at the mouth of the
Bosphorus, with a Russian army encamped
on the plains of Adrianople,
would settle the occupancy in a week.
In the mean time, France keeps up a
powerful army in Algeria; and the
question is, which would be first in
the race for Alexandria? We observe
that Ibrahim is building fortifications,
and concentrating his strength
on the sea-side; and the sagacity of
this gallant son of a gallant father must
often look to the sands of the Libyan
desert, and listen for the sounds of the
trumpet from the shores of Cyreniaca.

Miss Martineau is lady-president
of the gossip school; and it is one of
the especial characters of that school,
to think that every trivial occurrence
of their lives merits the attention of
mankind. She thus informs us of the
first idea of her journey.

“In the autumn of 1846, I left
home for, as I supposed, a few weeks,
to visit some of my family and friends.
At Liverpool, I was invited by my
friends, Mr and Mrs Richard V. Yates,
to accompany them in their proposed
travels in the East. At Malta, we
fell in with Mr Joseph C. Ewart,
who presently joined our party, and
remained with us till we reached
Malta on our return. There is nothing
that I do not owe to my companions
for their unceasing care.
They permitted me to read to them my
Egyptian Journal. There was not
time for the others.” All this is in
the purest style of gossipry. Her
first views of Africa belong to the
same style. On a “lurid evening in
November,” she saw a something,
which, however, was not the African
shore, but an island. At last, however
she saw a headland, a sandy
shore, a tower; but even this was
not Egypt. So she steamed on, until
certain signs gave the presumption that
Alexandria lay in the distance. She
“expected” to have arrived at noon,
but was detained until twilight! All
those things might have happened to
her if she had been sitting in a
bathing machine any where between
Brighton and Dover,—the Martello
supplying the place of the Arab
tower, to considerable advantage.
She then followed the route of the
million, the Cairan canal, Cairo, and
the Nile, up to the Cataracts.

She has a picturesque pen, and
describes well; her art being to
strike off the first impression on her
mind, with the first impression on
her eye. One of her fellow-travellers
had asked her whether she
would wish to have the first glimpse
of the Pyramids; she made her way
through the passengers to the bows of
the boat, and there indulged herself
with her triumph over the “careless
talkers.”

“In a minute, I saw them, emerging
from behind a sandhill. They
were very small, for we were still
twenty-five miles from Cairo. But
there could be no doubt about them
for a moment, so sharp and clear were
the light and shadow on the two sides
which we saw. I had been assured
that I should be disappointed in the
first sight of the Pyramids. And I
had maintained that I could not be
disappointed, as of all the wonders of
the world this is the most literal, and
to a dweller among mountains, like
myself, the least imposing. I now
found both my informant and myself
mistaken. So far from being disappointed,
I was filled with surprise
and awe; and so far from having anticipated
what I saw, I felt as if I
had never before looked on any thing
so new, as those clear, vivid masses,
with their sharp blue shadows, standing
firm and alone in their expanse of
sand. In a few minutes they appeared
to grow wonderfully larger, and they
looked lustrous and most imposing in
the evening light. This impression of
the Pyramids was never fully renewed.
I admired them every evening from[187]
my window at Cairo, and I took the
surest means of convincing myself of
their vastness, by going to the top of
the largest; but this first view of them
was the most moving, and I cannot
think of it now without emotion.”

It is remarkable that, after some
thousand years of ancient inquiry,
and at least a century of keen and
even of toilsome research, by modern
scholarship, the world knows little
more of the Pyramids than it knew,
when the priesthood kept all the secrets
of Egypt. By whom they were
built, for what, or when, have given
birth to volumes of researches; but to
those questions no answers have been
given worth the paper they cost in
answering. Whether they were built
by Israelite slaves or by Asiatic
invaders, for sacrifice or for sepulture,
or for both, or for the glory of
individual kings, or for the memory
of dynasties, or for treasure-houses,
or for astronomical purposes, or for
the mere employment of the multitude—workhouses
having probably
found their origin in Egypt—or for the
rough ostentation of royal power: all are
points undetermined since the travels
of Herodotus. But that they must
have cost stupendous toil, there is full
evidence—the great Pyramid covering
thirteen acres; exhibiting a mass of
stone equal to six Plymouth break-waters,
and rising to a height of 479
feet, or 15 feet higher than St Peter’s
spire, and 119 higher than St Paul’s.

But this style of monstrous building
perplexes as much by its general
diffusion, as by the magnitude of its
several instances. We find it not
only in Egypt, where the Pyramids
spread for seventy miles along the
western shore of the Nile, and once
evidently clustered like Arab tents,
but in Upper Egypt and Nubia: they
are to be found also in Mesopotamia.
The Birs Nimrod, (the temple
of Belus,) and the Mujelibè, near
Babylon, were evidently built on
the pyramidal plan, if not actual
pyramids. They have been found in
India. They have been found even
on the other side of the Atlantic; and
the largest in the world is the pyramid
of Cholula, in Mexico, covering an
area of more than forty-seven acres,
or above three times the base of the
greatest Egyptian pyramid. All the
pyramids, in both Asia, Africa, and
America, have the sides facing the
cardinal points, excepting those of
Nubia,—an exception probably arising
from the rudeness of the people.
In many of those pyramids, remnants
of the dead, and bones of the lower
animals, have been found; but both may
have been placed there for purposes of
superstition. The resistance of the
pyramidal form to the effects of climate
has been surmised as the origin of
the choice; but the equatorial countries
of the East know little of the weather
which, among us, destroys public
constructions. It is at least possible,
that a form so little adapted to
dwelling, or to any of the common
uses of life, or even to the direct purposes
of sepulture, may have been
chosen, from its resemblance to the
shape of flame kindled on a large
scale. The Egyptians chiefly buried
their dead in catacombs. The pyramid
was undoubtedly borrowed from
the East; and, like the obelisk—also
an Eastern memorial, whose general
uselessness still perplexes inquiry—may
have been an emblem of that
worship of fire, which ascends to so
remote an antiquity, was the worship of
the early East, and was, we are strongly
inclined to believe, the general worship
of the apostate antediluvian world.

There is no country on earth which
more curiously substantiates the saying
of the wisest of kings, that “there,
is nothing new under the sun,” than
Egypt. Every art of European life,
and even of European luxury, finds its
delineation among the tombs; every
incident of society, whether serious or
trifling, has its record on those subterranean
walls; we find every occupation,
every enjoyment, every national
festivity, and every sport, from the
nursery up to the assemblage of the
wrestler, the runner, and the dancer,
in short, the whole course of public
and private existence, three thousand
years ago, is revealed and revived for
the intelligence and admiration of the
nineteenth century of the Christian
era. Why those miscellanies of life
should be in tombs, where they must
have been shut up from the living
eye—why such labour of delineation,
why such incongruity of subject to the
place, why such cost lavished on designs
in the grave, are all problems,[188]
which must remain beyond human
answer, but which render Egypt the
most interesting of all dead nations to
the living world. Are those wonders,
those intimations of greater wonders,
those achievements of the arts, fully
explored? Certainly not. We quite
agree with Miss Martineau, that the
most fortunate boon for Europe would
be some mighty van or ventilator,
which will blow away all the sands of
Egypt. What a scene would then be
opened!

“One statue and sarcophagus,
brought from Memphis, was buried
130 feet below the surface. Who
knows but that the greater part of old
Memphis, and of other glorious cities,
lies almost unharmed beneath the
sand? Who can say what armies of
sphinxes might start up on the banks
of the river, or come forth from the
hill-sides of the interior, when the
cloud of sand had been wafted away?
The ruins which we now go to study
might then occupy only eminences,
while below might be miles of colonnade,
temples intact, and gods and
goddesses safe in their sanctuaries!”

If this is the language of enthusiasm,
there can be no question that barbarism
and time have covered a large
portion of the old glories of Egypt
from the eye of man; and that, while
what remains for the view of the traveller
is mutilated and worn away,
the much finer portion may be reserved
for the triumph of the investigator
spade in hand.

One of the best features of the book
is the dexterity with which those
tomb-pictures are interpreted by Miss
Martineau’s narrative. Every one
knows, that the majority of those pictures,
though often brilliantly coloured,
exhibit nothing but isolated or ill-placed
figures, of the rudest outline,
and the most ungainly attitudes. They
have a meaning; yet to ascertain that
meaning, and combine their action,
demands considerable imaginative
skill. We have a clever instance of
this art in the description of one of
the tombs.

The writer sees, in one compartment,
the master of a family. He is evidently
opulent—a man of large possessions—a
landlord; he has his people round
him—ploughing, sowing, harrowing,
reaping, thrashing, winnowing.

But the landlord is also a sportsman;
he has round him game, geese, and
fish. He is also a man of luxury; he
has a barge on the river, and a pavilion
built upon it. He is also a man
of hospitality; there is a banquet, with
the master and his wife in a great
chair; every lady has a flower in her
hand; a monkey is tied to the host’s
chair; and there are musicians with
a harp and the double pipe. But
there is also a final scene; the host
dies, the banquets are no more, his
mummy is in the consecrated boat,
which is to carry him over the river
of death, and which deposits him in
the land unknown.

All this is ingenious and probable,
and if Miss Martineau had confined
herself to the picturesque, had sported
her fancies in Egypt alone, and never
ventured beyond the Red Sea, we
might close the book, giving it all the
praise due to an original and lively
narrative. But when she plays the
theologian, we must stop, as we wish
that she had done.

On leaving Egypt, her party turn
their faces towards the Wilderness;
and here the pen of the rash writer
rambles away into lucubrations, neither
consistent with the facts of history,
nor suitable to the feelings of the
scene. She begins by manufacturing
a romance for Moses. She first tells
us that he was “of the priestly caste,”
a matter rendered utterly improbable
by the declaration of Scripture, that
“by faith, when he was come to years,
he refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s
daughter, choosing rather to
suffer affliction with the people of
God.” She then proceeds to tell us
a great many things, of which Moses
has told us nothing: for example,
that in the desert, which she regards
as a place peculiarly “fruitful of meditation,”
(we doubt whether it produces
much of this fruit among the
Bedouins,) Moses and “Mahomet after
him” (valuable companionship!) learned
from the Past how to prophesy of the
future.

“There,” says Miss Martineau, “as
Moses sat under the shrubby palm,
and its moist rock, did the Past come
at the call of his instructed memory,
and tell him how those mighty Egyptians
had been slaves, as his Hebrew
brethren now were,” &c., and came to[189]
the conclusion (by no means an unnatural
one in any case of slavery,) “that
the Hebrews must be removed and educated,
before they could be established.”
We then arrive at the confidential
part of the story.

“In following up this course of
speculation, he was led to perceive a
mighty truth, which appears to have
been known to no man before him,—the
truth that all ideas are the common
heritage of all men. (!)…
As the images crossed him in his
solitude, of the religious feasts of the
Egyptians, the gross brute-worship
into which they had sunk, &c., he conceived
the brave purpose, the noblest
enterprise, I believe, on record, of admitting
every one of Jehovah’s people
to the fullest possible knowledge of
them.”

Of all these meditations not an iota
is mentioned in the Scriptures. The
story, however, goes on: Moses decided
that the people must be removed. It
does not tell us how. But it was done.
Three millions of slaves were torn from
the grasp of a king, at the head of an
army of six hundred chariots and horsemen.
But the grand difficulty arose—if
they must be educated, where was to be
the national school? who to be their
tutors? Moses meditated again, and the
difficulty vanished. He had known the
Arabs of the Wilderness long. Miss
Martineau tells us that he knew their
honour, their virtues, their “comparative
piety!” &c., &c.; and he determined
to make them the teachers of
his Egyptianised people. In this fortunate
expedient, she forgot, and probably
did not know, that those sons
of desert simplicity, hospitality, piety,
and so forth, were the Amalekites,
one of the most ferocious tribes of
earth, the savage borderers of Sinai;
who no sooner saw the advance of the
Israelites than, instead of teaching
them the “virtues,” they made a desperate
foray on them, and would have
butchered the whole population if they
had not been beaten by a miracle.

We are also entirely left in the
dark, in this theory, as to the means
by which the nation were subsisted
for forty years in the Wilderness,
where the thousandth part of their
number could never since have subsisted
for as many days; how they
swept before their undisciplined crowd
the armies of Palestine, stormed their
fortresses, and took possession of their
land; how they acquired the most perfect
system of legislation in the ancient
world; how they formed a religion
unrivalled in purity, truth, and sanctity;
how they conceived a ceremonial
which was almost wholly a prophecy,
the revelation of a mightier
than Moses to come, the pledge of a
more comprehensive religion, and the
dawn of that triumph of truth over
falsehood, which was to be the hope,
the consolation, and ultimately the
glory of mankind.

Need we remind the Christian, that
the Scriptures account for all those
mighty things by the power and the
mercy of the God of Israel alone;
that Moses was simply an instrument
in the hand of Providence; that so far
from meditating in the desert, plans
of Jewish liberation, he was even a
reluctant instrument. Every part of his
character and condition repelled the
very idea of his acting from himself.
He was eighty years old; he had
been forty years without seeing the
face of his countrymen; his bold
spirit had been so much changed by
time, as to render him the “meekest”
of men; and even when the miracle of
the Divine presence was before him, he
pleaded his unfitness for the task, and
at length yielded only to the repeated
command of Jehovah.

Willingly acquitting the writer of
these volumes of all evil intention, we
regret that she should have touched
on Palestine at all. Whatever weakness
there may be in her lucubrations
on Moses, it is fully matched by her
lucubrations on what she calls “Bibliolatry.”
But we shall not follow her
rambles through subjects on which no
mind ought to look but with a sense of
the narrowness of human faculties,
and with an humble and necessary
solicitation for that loftier enlightenment
which is given only to the
humble heart. The knowledge of
Scripture is to be attained only by the
sincere search after truth, by natural
homage in the presence of Infinite
Wisdom, and by the intelligent exertion
of mind, and the faithful gratitude,
which alike rejoice in obeying
the revealed will of Heaven.

[190]

EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND TWELVE.

A RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW.

In the spring of the year 1815, a
youth of sixteen, Lewis Rellstab by
name, whom death had recently deprived
of his father, left the Berlin
academy, where he was pursuing, with
much success, the study of music, to
enter the Prussian army as a volunteer.
Napoleon’s return from Elba
had just called Germany to arms; and
the rising generation, emulous of their
elder brethren, whose scars and decorations
recalled the glorious campaign
of 1813, flocked to the Prussian banner.
But young Rellstab’s moral courage
and patriotic zeal exceeded his physical
capabilities. Recruiting officers
shook their heads at his delicate frame,
and inspecting surgeons refused to
pass him as able-bodied. Rejected,
he still persevered, entered a military
school, and in due time became officer
of artillery. Leaving the service in
1821, he fixed himself at Berlin, and
applied diligently to literary pursuits.
He was already known as the author
of songs of fair average merit, some
of which are popular in Germany to
the present day; but now he took up
literature as a profession, stimulated
to industry by loss of fortune in an
unlucky speculation. Of great perseverance
and active mind, he essayed
his talents in various departments of
the belles-lettres, in journalism, polemics,
and criticism. As a musical
critic, he ranks amongst the best.
One of his early works, a satirical
tale entitled, “Henrietta, or the Beautiful
Singer,” was disapproved by the
authorities, and procured him several
months’ imprisonment in the fortress
of Spandau. At a later period, his
systematic and incessant opposition to
Spontini the composer, from whose
appointment as director of the Berlin
opera he foretold the ruin of the German
school of music, procured him
other six weeks of similar punishment.
He has managed several newspapers
in succession, and, in the intervals of
his editorial labours, has produced a
number of tales and novels, three
sketchy volumes entitled “Paris and
Algiers,” and a tragedy called “Eugene
Aram.” Simultaneously with
these various occupations, he has
found time to form some excellent
singers for the German stage, and to
advocate, with unwearying and successful
zeal, the adoption of railroads
in Germany. With such accumulated
avocations, it is not surprising
if his writings sometimes exhibit that
lengthiness and verbal superfluity, the
usual consequence of hurried composition
and imperfect revision. Some
of his best-conceived and most original
tales lose power from prolixity:
his good materials, too, often lack
arrangement, and are encumbered
with inferior matter. Still, he is one
of the few living German novelists
whose works rise high above the present
dull, stagnant level of the light
literature of his country. It is not
now our intention minutely to analyse
Mr Rellstab’s general literary abilities,
or to criticise the twenty compendious
volumes forming the latest edition of
his complete works. We propose confining
ourselves to one novel, which
we consider his masterpiece, as it also
is his longest and most important
work, and the one most popular in
Germany. Notwithstanding the faults
we have glanced at, we hold “1812”
the best novel of its class that for a
long time has appeared in the German
language. Its historical and military
chapters would, by their fidelity and
spirit, give it high rank in whatever
tongue it had been written. And the
blemishes observable in its more imaginative
and romantic portions are
chargeable less upon the author than
upon the foibles of the school and
country to which he belongs.

It is a strong argument, were any
needed, in favour of the superiority of
the English literature of the day over
that of Germany, that twenty English
novels are translated into German for
every German one that appears in
English. To say nothing of high
class books which are dished up in
the Deutsch with incredible rapidity,
(of Mr Warren’s last work, three
translations appeared within a few[191]
days after it was possible the original
could have reached Germany,) all our
more prolific and popular English novelists
receive the honours of Germanisation.
Not a catalogue of a
German library or bookseller but exhibits
the names of Messrs Marryat,
Dickens, James, Ainsworth, Lever,
&c., occupying the high places—exalted
at the tops of columns, in all
the glory of Roman capitals; and truly
not without reason, when compared
with most of the gentry that succeed
and precede them. Their works appear
in every possible form,—detached,
in “complete editions,” in
“choice collections of foreign literature,”
even in monthly parts, when
so published in England. Authors
who have written less, or anonymously,
or who are less known, must
often be content to forego the immortalisation
of a Leipsic catalogue, although
their books will not the less be
found there, sometimes with the bare
notification that they are from English
sources; at others, unceremoniously
appropriated by the translator as results
of his own unaided genius. Equal
liberties are taken with the romantic
literature of France and Sweden.
Very different is the state of things in
England. A translation from the
German, unless it be of a short tale in
a periodical, is a thing almost unknown—certainly
of rare occurrence.
Miss Bremer’s poultry-yard romances,
and Christian Andersen’s novels,
reached us through a German medium,
but are originally Scandinavian. The
only other recent translations of novels,
in amount and volume worth the
naming, are those from the French of
Sue, Dumas, and Co., amusing gentlemen
enough; but the circulation of
whose works had, perhaps, just as
well been confined to those capable
of reading them in the original. The
German literature of the last twenty
years has yielded little to the English
translator, or rather has been little
made use of; for, without entertaining
a very exalted opinion of its value
and merit, it were absurd to suppose
that some good things might not be
selected from the hundreds of novels,
tales, and romances, that each successive
year brings forth in a country
where any man who can hold a pen,
and is acquainted with orthography,
deems himself qualified for an author,
and where an astonishingly large proportion
of the population act upon
this conviction. Mr Rellstab’s “1812”
is one of the few ears of wheat worthy
of extraction from the wilderness of
tares and stubble. Its great length,
which might, however, have been advantageously
curtailed, has, perhaps,
proved an obstacle to its translation.
Moreover, it is but partially known,
even amongst the very limited number
of English persons (chiefly ladies)
addicted to German reading. Of one
thing we are convinced,—that a book
of equal merit appearing in England
is certain of prompt and reiterated reproduction
in Germany; not only in
the language of that country, but in
those piratical reprints which give in
an eighteen-penny duodecimo the contents
of three half-guinea post-octavos.

It is quite natural that Mr Rellstab,
whose youthful predilections were so
strongly military, who himself wore
the uniform during his first six years
of manhood, and who was contemporary,
at the age when impressions are
strongest, of the gigantic wars waged
by Napoleon in Spain, Germany, and
Russia, should recall with peculiar
pleasure, at a later period of his life,
the martial deeds with which in his
boyhood all men’s mouths were filled;
that he should select them as a subject
for his pen, dwell willingly upon
their details, and bestow the utmost
pains upon their illustration. His
original plan of an historical romance
was far more comprehensive than the
one to which he finally adhered. He
proposed employing as a stage for
his actors all the European countries
then the theatre of war. This bold
plan gave great scope for contrast,
allowing him to exhibit his personages,
chiefly military men, engaged alternately
with the Cossack and the Guerilla—alternately
broiling under the
sun of Castile, and frozen in Muscovy’s
snows. But the project was
more easily formed than executed;
and Mr Rellstab soon found (to use
his own words) that he had taken
Hercules’ club for a plaything. The
mass was too ponderous to wield; to
interweave the entire military history
of so busy a period with the plot of a
romance, entailed an army of characters[192]
and a series of complications difficult
to manage; and that might
have ended by wearying the reader.
Convinced that his design was too ambitious,
he reduced it; limiting himself
to the Russian campaign—itself no
trifle to grapple with. This plan he
successfully carried out. He had
hoped to do so, he says, in three
volumes, but was compelled to
extend his limits, and fill four.
The necessity is not obvious. In
our opinion, “1812” would gain
by compression (especially of the first
half) within the limits originally proposed.
Although some well-drawn
and well-sustained characters are
early introduced, and although the
reader obtains, in the very first
chapter, a mystery to ruminate, whilst
of incident there is certainly an abundance,
the real fascination of the book
resides in the account of the advance
to Moscow, of the conflagration of the
city, and the subsequent retreat. The
great power and truthfulness with
which these events are depicted, convey
the impression that the writer
was an eyewitness of the scenes he so
well describes. As this was not the
case, we cannot doubt that Mr
Rellstab obtained much information
from some who made that terrible
campaign. He acknowledges his
great obligation to Count Segur’s remarkable
history.

As regards Mr Rellstab’s plot, its
ingenuity is undeniable, and, in fact,
excessive. More ingenious than probable,
the coincidences are too numerous
and striking; the artist’s hand
is too visible. The characters are too
obliging in their exits and entrances;
ever vanishing and reappearing just
at the right moment, and meeting
each other in the most unexpected
and extraordinary manner. It is
difficult to lose sight of the wires;
the movements of the puppets are
manifestly strained for the exhibitor’s
convenience. One never feels sure
who is the hero of the book; the young
German most prominent in its earlier
portion, and who is intended for the
principal character, is a tame youth,
and cuts quite a secondary figure in
the latter volumes. His friend
Bernard, a joyous artist, whom circumstances
convert into a private
soldier, and his commander the
Polish Colonel Rasinski, a worthy
comrade of the heroic Poniatowsky,
are much more lifelike and interesting.
The mysteries of the tale, and the
difficulties which of course beset the
paths of the various pairs of lovers,
are pretty well cleared up and dispelled
at the end of the third volume.
The fourth, which includes the worst
portion of the retreat, is perhaps the
most interesting; partly for the very
reason that we have got rid of the
private entanglements of the principal
personages, who are seen grouped together,
and, including a lady, struggling
against the frightful hardships
and dangers of that unparalleled
military disaster. It will give an idea
of the tangled nature of Mr Rellstab’s
plot and under-plots (all finally unravelled
with considerable cleverness)
to state, that in the foremost row
stand five gentlemen and three ladies;
that each of the ladies is beloved, at
one period or other of the story, by
at least two of the gentlemen, who,
on the other hand, are all five bosom
friends, and, in this capacity, make the
most magnanimous sacrifices of love
to friendship. Manifestly, the only
way of getting out of such a fix, is to
kill freely, which Mr Rellstab accordingly
does, the retreat from Moscow
affording him fine opportunities,
whereof he unsparingly avails himself.
The closing chapter shows us the very
numerous dramatis personæ reduced
to two happy couples, dwelling, turtle-dove
fashion, in a garden near Dresden,
and to an elderly Polish lady,
on the wing for America. Having
thus told the end—a matter of very
slight importance to the interest of
the book—we will take a glance at the
commencement.

The opening scene introduces us to
a young German, who, after twelve
months passed in Italy at the conclusion
of his academical studies, is on
his way back to his native land. The
entrance of Napoleon’s armies is once
more converting Northern Germany
into a vast camp, and Ludwig Rosen
is hurrying homewards to the protection
of his sister and widowed mother,
then living in retirement at Dresden.
Upon his journey to Italy, a year previously,
he had encountered in the
valley of Aosta a party of travellers,
to one of whom, a young and very[193]
lovely woman, he restored a bracelet
she had dropped upon the highway.
Although this led to no acquaintance
or intercourse beyond the exchange
of a few sentences, the beauty of the
foreigner (for such she certainly was,
although of what country it was hard
to decide,) had left a very strong impression
upon the young man’s memory
and imagination. During his residence
in Italy he sought her every
where, but in vain. He could not
trace her route; ignorant of her name,
he knew not for whom to inquire.
Once more upon the threshold of Italy,
about to quit the romantic land where
her image had so often filled his daydreams,
he pauses at the outskirts of
Duomo d’ Ossola, the last Italian
town, to take a fond and final look at
the paradise he is on the point of
leaving. Travelling on foot, his
motions depend but on his own
caprice, and he leaves the high-road
to ascend an adjacent hillock, commanding
a fine view. The blast of a
post-horn and crack of whips break in
upon his meditations, and an open
travelling carriage rolls rapidly along
the causeway. In one of two women
who occupy it, Rosen thinks
he recognises his incognita, but before
he can reach the road, the vehicle is
in the town. It is evening, and
Rosen, persuaded the travellers will
halt for the night at Duomo d’ Ossola,
hurries after them to the open square
where the guardhouse and the principal
inn are situated. The carriage stands
at the door of the latter, but fresh
horses are being harnessed, and the
youth’s hopes of passing the night
under the same roof with the lady
of his thoughts, and of improving
his very slight acquaintance with her,
begin to vanish in vapour. An unexpected
incident again gives them consistence:—

“A large circle of idlers had collected
round the travellers. An officer,
issuing from the guardhouse, a
paper in his hand, made his way
through the crowd and approached
the carriage-door: on his appearance
the young lady got out, and took a few
steps to meet him. The officer bowed
and addressed her with great courtesy;
but his manner, and the deprecating
shrug of his shoulders, indicated inability
to comply with some wish she
had expressed. Ludwig drew nearer;
but as the lady—of whose identity
with her he sought he grew each
moment more convinced—had her
face turned from him, he made the circuit
of the crowd to obtain a sight of
her countenance. Heavens, it was
herself! Her features were paler and
more anxious than at their last meeting,
and a tear trembled in her beauteous
blue eye. Yielding to an irresistible
impulse, Ludwig approached
her, resolved, at risk of offence, to
greet the lovely being whose apparition
had gladdened his entrance
into the glorious land he now was
quitting, and to remind her of the
moment of their first meeting and
too speedy separation. He was encouraged
to this step by beholding her
unaccompanied, save by an old servant
seated upon the box, and by an elderly
woman, to all appearance an attendant,
or humble companion. He hastily
stepped forward out of the crowd,
which had fallen a little back. As he
did so, the lady’s glance met his, and
so sudden and joyful a glow over-spread
her features, that he could not
for an instant doubt her recognition
of him. He was about to salute and
address her, when, with startling haste,
she exclaimed in French, ‘Here is
my brother!’ and hurried to meet
him. Before Ludwig, astounded at
what he took for an extraordinary mistake,
had time to utter a word, she continued
in Italian, and in a loud tone,
so that all around might hear and
understand, ‘Thank God, brother, you
are come at last!’ Then, in a rapid
whisper, and in German, ‘I am lost,’
she said, ‘if you deny me.’ With
prompt decision, she turned to the
officer, took the paper from his hand
and presented it to Ludwig. ‘This
gentleman would not admit the regularity
of our passport because you
were not present,’ said she, reverting
to the French language. ‘See what
trouble you give us, dear brother, by
your romantic partiality for byways!
You are Count Wallersheim,’ she
whispered in German.

“Startled and confounded as Ludwig
was by this strange adventure, he
retained sufficient presence of mind to
understand that it was in his power to
render important service to the beautiful
woman who stood anxious and[194]
tearful before him. Readily taking
his cue, his reply was prompt. ‘Be
not uneasy, dear sister,’ he said, ‘I
will explain to the gentleman.’ He
turned to the Frenchman, and in order
to gain time and some insight into the
circumstances of the case, ‘I must
beg you, sir,’ he said ‘to repeat your
objections to our passport. Ladies
have little experience in such matters.’
‘I have now,’ replied the officer ‘not
the slightest objection to make. You
are set down in the passport as the
companion of the countess your sister
and yet you were not with her. The
passport was, consequently, not in
order. The countess certainly told
me you had left her only for a short
time, to ramble on foot, and that you
would rejoin her beyond the town;
but at frontier places, like Duomo
d’ Ossola, our orders are so strict that
I should have been compelled to detain
the young lady till you made your
appearance. Rest assured, however,
count, that I should, have held it my
duty to have had you sought upon
the road to Sempione, to inform you
of the obstacle to your sister’s progress.
I strongly advise you to remain
with the countess so long as you
are in this district, or you will inevitably
encounter delay and annoyance.
Once over the Swiss frontier, you are
out of our jurisdiction, and travelling
is easier.’