INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY MISCELLANY
Of Literature, Art, and Science.

NUMISMATIC ARCHÆOLOGY.

A magnificent work¹
upon this subject has just been completed in Paris, where it
was commenced fifteen years ago. It was begun under the
auspices of M. Paul Delaroche and M.C. Lenormand, member of
the Institute, and well known already as one of the first
authorities in the numismatic branch of archæology. Some
faint idea of the greatness of the task may be given by
stating that it embraces the whole range of art, from the
regal coins of Syracuse and of the Ptolemies, down to those
of our day; that such a stupendous scheme should ever have
been carried into execution is not solely due to the
admirable ease and fidelity, with which the “Collas machine”
renders the smallest and the largest gems of the antique:
but to him who first felt, appreciated, and afterward
promoted its capabilities in this labor of love, M.A.
Lachevardiere. Comparisons and contrasts, which are the life
of art, though generally confined to the mental vision, are
not the least of the recommendations of this vast work. For
the first time have the minor treasures of each country been
brought together, and not the least conspicuous portion are
those from the British Museum and the Bank of England.

Whether we consider the selection of these monumental
relics, the explanatory letterpress, or the engravings which
reproduce them, we are struck by the admirable taste, science,
and fidelity with which the largest as well as the smallest
gems have each and every one been made to tally in size with
the originals.

The collection of the “Trésor de Numismatique et Glyptique,”
consisting of twenty volumes in folio, and containing a
thousand engraved plates in folio, reproduces upward of 15,000
specimens, and is divided into three classes—1st. The
coins, medals, cameos, &c. of antiquity; 2d. Those of the
middle ages; lastly, those of modern times. The details of this
immense mass of artistic wealth would be endless; but these
three classes seem to be arranged according to the latest
classification of numismatists.

In the first class may be noticed—1. The regal coins
of Greece, which contains, beside the portraits of the Greek
Kings, to be found in Visconti’s “Iconographie,” copied from
medals and engraved gems, all the coins bearing the Greek name
of either a king, a prince, or a tyrant, and every variety of
these types, whether they bear the effigy of a prince, or only
reproduce his name. To the medals of each sovereign are joined
the most authentic and celebrated engraved gems of European
cabinets. Next come the series of portraits of the Roman
emperors and their families, with all the important varieties
of Roman numismatics, amongst which will be found the most
celebrated coins of France, Vienna, Dresden, Munich, Florence,
Naples, St. Petersburg, Weimar, &c.; and, moreover, those
medallions which perpetuate great events. These two volumes
contain eight-fold more matter than the great work of
Visconti.

In the second class, containing the works of the middle
ages, and showing the uninterrupted progress of the numismatic
art down to modern times, and forming alone fourteen volumes,
we find the source which the French artists and men of letters
have studied with such predilection. First in order are the
Italian medals of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
chiefly by the famous Victor Pisano, a Veronese, whom Nasari
has so much lauded. The scholars and imitators of Pisano also
produced works as interesting as historical documents as they
are admirable in workmanship. Here also will be found the
French and English seals, in which the balance of skill in
design and execution is acknowledged to be in our favor.

Less barbarous, and indeed perfect works of art, in
character of costume and visage, are the medals struck in
Germany during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when
the influence of Albert Durer and his school was strongly felt.
And finally, relics of ornamental art of different nations and
epochs.

In the third class, two parts only are devoted to
contemporary art; the medals illustrative of the French
revolution of 1789; those of the “Empire” and of the Emperor
[pg 258] “Napoleon;” generally
smacking of the florid and corrupt taste of that period,
they are nevertheless curious as being often the sole
evidence of the facts commemorated. There is, however, a
manifest improvement in the late ones, and in them may be
traced the transition from the independent ideas of the
revolution to the subsequent submission to one man: and not
less striking is the transition from a slip-shod style of
art to a pedantic imitation of the antique. The “Trésor de
Numismatique et de Glyptique” is the most scientific and
important work of art which has been executed and achieved
of late years in France. Our great public libraries may be
proud of possessing so rich, so valuable, and so curious a
collection,

Most lovers of art have their favorite periods and
well-beloved masters, but in this varied range of excellence it
is difficult which to select for preference and admiration. The
cameos have a beauty and finesse which far surpass that
of busts and statues; they evince the skill of grouping, which,
with rare exceptions, such as the Niobe and Laocoon, is seldom
aimed at in the more important pieces of sculpture. Cameos,
moreover, let us, as it were, into the secrets of indoor life.
To these considerations we may add that these gems have had an
immense influence on French modern art. The “Apotheosis of
Augustus” especially, known to antiquarians as the “Agate of
Tiberius,” the largest cameo in the world, and beautifully
engraved the size of the original in this collection, may be
traced in more than one of their late compositions.

It is said that large medallions are a sign of taste either
in the medalist or the monarch he is supposed to honor; if so,
Dupré and Varin have drawn a thick vail over the effulgence of
Louis XIV. We would not, however, lose their wigs and smiles
for a world of historiettes.

But it is to be remembered that the more names are blazoned
on works of art, the more art becomes deteriorated. In this
respect the present collection shows the rapidly progressive
march of this evil through twenty-five centuries—a most
instructive subject of contemplation.

THE CSIKOS OF HUNGARY.

Of the chivalry, the gallantry, the splendor, the
hospitality, the courage, and the love of liberty of the
Hungarian noble or gentleman, no one doubts. Of his ideas of
true constitutional freedom, or the zeal with which that or
Hungarian independence has been maintained first through
Turkish, and then German domination for some hundred years
past, doubts may be entertained. Neither do the Hungarian
peasantry or people reflect high credit on their “natural
superiors.” Something should be deducted for the forced
vivacity and straining after effect of the littérateur; but
this sketch of a large class of peasantry from Max
Schlesinger’s “War in Hungary,” just published in London, must
have some foundation in truth—and very like the Red
Indians or half-breeds of Spanish America the people look.

“The Csikos is a man who from his birth, somehow or other,
finds himself seated upon a foal. Instinctively the boy remains
fixed upon the animal’s back, and grows up in his seat as other
children do in the cradle.

“The boy grows by degrees to a big horse-herd. To earn his
livelihood, he enters the service of some nobleman, or of the
Government, who possess in Hungary immense herds of wild
horses. These herds range over a tract of many German square
miles, for the most part some level plain, with wood, marsh,
heath, and moorland; they rove about where they please,
multiply, and enjoy freedom of existence. Nevertheless, it is a
common error to imagine that these horses, like a pack of
wolves in the mountains, are left to themselves and nature,
without any care or thought of man. Wild horses, in the proper
sense of the term, are in Europe at the present day only met
with in Bessarabia; whereas the so-called wild herds in Hungary
may rather be compared to the animals ranging in our large
parks, which are attended to and watched. The deer are left to
the illusion that they enjoy the most unbounded freedom; and
the deer-stalker, when in pursuit of his game, readily gives in
to the same illusion. Or, to take another simile, the reader
has only to picture to himself a well-constituted free state,
whether a republic or a monarchy is all one.

“The Csikos has the difficult task of keeping a watchful eye
upon these herds. He knows their strength, their habits, the
spots they frequent; he knows the birthday of every foal, and
when the animal, fit for training, should be taken out of the
herd. He has then a hard task upon his hands, compared with
which a Grand-Ducal wild-boar hunt is child’s play; for the
horse has not only to be taken alive from the midst of the
herd, but of course safe and sound in wind and limb. For this
purpose, the celebrated whip of the Csikos serves him; probably
at some future time a few splendid specimens of this instrument
will be exhibited in the Imperial Arsenal at Vienna, beside the
sword of Scanderberg and the Swiss ‘morning-stars.’

“This whip has a stout handle from one and a half to two
feet long, and a cord which measures not less than from
eighteen to twenty-four feet in length. The cord is attached to
a short iron chain, fixed to the top of the handle by an iron
ring. A large leaden button is fastened to the end of the cord,
and similar smaller buttons are distributed along it at
distances, according to certain rules derived from experience,
of which we are ignorant. Armed with this weapon, which the
Csikos carries in his belt, together with a short
grappling-iron or hook, he sets out on his horse-chase. Thus
mounted and equipped without saddle or stirrup, he flies like
[pg 259] the storm-wind over the
heath, with such velocity that the grass scarcely bends
under the horse’s hoof; the step of his horse is not heard,
and the whirling cloud of dust above his head alone marks
his approach and disappearance. Although familiar with the
use of a bridle, he despises such a troublesome article of
luxury, and guides his horse with his voice, hands, and
feet—nay, it almost seems as if he directed it by the
mere exercise of the will, as we move our feet to the right
or left, backward or forward, without its ever coming into
our head to regulate our movements by a leather strap.

“In this manner for hours he chases the flying herd, until
at length he succeeds in approaching the animal which he is
bent on catching. He then swings his whip round in immense
circles, and throws the cord with such dexterity and precision
that it twines around the neck of his victim. The leaden button
at the end, and the knots along the cord, form a noose, which
draws closer and tighter the faster the horse hastens on.

“See how he flies along with outstretched legs, his mane
whistling in the wind, his eye darting fire, his mouth covered
with foam, and the dust whirling aloft on all sides! But the
noble animal breathes shorter, his eye grows wild and staring,
his nostrils are reddened with blood, the veins of his neck are
distended like cords, his legs refuse longer service—he
sinks exhausted and powerless, a picture of death. But at the
same instant the pursuing steed likewise stands still and fixed
as if turned to stone. An instant, and the Csikos has flung
himself off his horse upon the ground, and inclining his body
backward, to keep the noose tight, he seizes the cord
alternately with the right and left hand, shorter and shorter,
drawing himself by it nearer and nearer to the panting and
prostrate animal, till at last coming up to it he flings his
legs across its back. He now begins to slacken the noose
gently, allowing the creature to recover breath: but hardly
does the horse feel this relief, before he leaps up, and darts
off again in a wild course, as if still able to escape from his
enemy. But the man is already bone of his bone and flesh of his
flesh; he sits fixed upon his neck as if grown to it, and makes
the horse feel his power at will, by tightening or slackening
the cord. A second time the hunted animal sinks upon the
ground; again he rises, and again breaks down, until at length,
overpowered with exhaustion, he can no longer stir a
limb….

“The foot-soldier who has discharged his musket is lost when
opposed to the Csikos. His bayonet, with which he can defend
himself against the Uhlans and Hussars, is here of no use to
him; all his practiced maneuvers and skill are unavailing
against the long whip of his enemy, which drags him to the
ground, or beats him to death with his leaden buttons; nay,
even if he had still a charge in his musket, he could sooner
hit a bird on the wing than the Csikos, who, riding round and
round him in wild bounds, dashes with his steed first to one
side then to another, with the speed of lightning, so as to
frustrate any aim. The horse-soldier, armed in the usual
manner, fares not much better; and wo to him if he meets a
Csikos singly! better to fall in with a pack of ravenous
wolves.”

THE PRESENT RELIGION OF PERSIA.

An account of the Expedition for the survey of the rivers
Euphrates and Tigris, carried on by order of the British
Government, in the years 1835, 1836, and 1837; preceded by
geographical and historical notices of the regions situated
between the Nile and the Indus, with fourteen maps and charts,
and ninety-seven plates, besides numerous woodcuts, has just
appeared in London, in four large volumes, from the pen of
Lieutenant-Colonel Chesney, R.A., F.R.S., &c., commander of
the Expedition. It is too comprehensive a work ever to be
reprinted here, or to be much read, even in England, but it is
undoubtedly very valuable as an authority. The following
paragraphs from it describe the present state of religion in
Persia:

“The title of Múlla is conferred on a candidate by some
member of the order, after the requisite examination in
theology and law; and the person is then intrusted with the
education of youth, as well as the administration of justice,
and the practice of law. The Múllas sometimes possess
sufficient power not only to influence the people at large, but
even the King himself.

“Of this class of priests, those who have been successful in
life are either placed in mosques or private families, waiting
for advancement; but a greater number are nominally attached to
colleges, and live by the practice of astrology,
fortune-telling, the sale of charms, talismans, &c. They
who are not possessed of the requisite ingenuity to subsist by
the credulity of others, take charge of an inferior school, or
write letters, and draw up marriage and other engagements, for
those who are unequal to the task. They mix at the same time
largely in the domestic concerns of families. But in addition
to these and other vocations, a considerable number of the
lowest priests derive a scanty support from that charity which
no one denies to the true believer. These men wander as fakirs
from place to place, carrying news, and repeating poems, tales,
&c., mixed with verses from the Koran. The heterodox
religions are very numerous; nor is Irián without her
free-thinkers, as the Kamúrs and Mu’tazelís, (Mitaulis,) who
deny everything which they cannot prove by natural reason. A
third sect, the Mahadelis, or Molochadis, still maintain the
Magian belief that the stars and the planets govern all things.
Another, the Ehl el Tabkwid, (men of truth,) hold that there is
no God except the four elements, and no rational soul or life
after this one. They maintain also, that all living bodies,
being mixtures of the elements, will
[pg 260] after death return to their
first principles. They also affirm that paradise and hell
belong to this world, into which every man returns in the
form of a beast, a plant, or again as a man; and that in
this second state, he is great, powerful, and happy, or
poor, despicable, and unhappy, according to his former
merits or demerits. In practice they inculcate kindness to
and respect for each other, with implicit obedience to their
chiefs, who are called Pir, (old men,) and are furnished
with all kinds of provisions for their subsistence. This
sect is found in the provinces of Irák and Fárs.

“The Táríkh Zenádikah (way of the covetous) are directly
opposed to the last on the subject of transmigration; and they
believe that God is in all places, and performs all things.
They likewise maintain that the whole visible universe is only
a manifestation of the Supreme Being; the soul itself being a
portion of the Divine essence. Therefore, they consider, that
whatever appears to the eye is God, and that all religious
rites should be comprised in the contemplation of God’s
goodness and greatness.

“On these various creeds the different branches of Suffeeism
seem to have been founded. One of the most extraordinary of
these sects is the Rasháníyah; the followers of which believe
in the transmigration of souls, and the manifestation of the
Divinity in the persons of holy men. They maintain likewise,
that all men who do not join their sect are to be considered as
dead, and that their goods belong, in consequence, to the true
believers, as the only survivors.”

THE “OLD DUKE OF QUEENSBURY.”

Mr. Burke gives in his gossiping book about the English
aristocracy, the following anecdotes of this once famous
person:

“Few men occupied a more conspicuous place about the court
and town for nearly seventy years, during the reigns of the
Second and Third Georges. Like Wilmot Earl of Rochester, he
pursued pleasure under every shape, and with as much ardor at
fourscore as he had done at twenty. At the decease of his
father, in 1731, he became Earl of March; and he subsequently,
in 1748, inherited his mother’s earldom of Ruglen, together
with the family’s estates in the counties of Edinburgh and
Linlithgow. These rich endowments of fortune, and a handsome
person, of which he was especially careful, combined to invest
the youthful Earl with no ordinary attractions, and the
ascendency they acquired he retained for a longer period than
any one of his contemporaries; from his first appearance in the
fashionable world in the year 1746, to the year he left it
forever, in 1810, at the age of eighty-five, he was always an
object of comparative notoriety. There was no interregnum in
the public course of his existence. His first distinction he
achieved on the turf; his knowledge of which, both in theory
and practice, equaled that of the most accomplished adepts of
Newmarket. In all his principal matches he rode himself, and in
that branch of equitation rivaled the most professional
jockeys. Properly accoutered in his velvet cap, red silken
jacket, buckskin breeches, and long spurs, his Lordship bore
away the prize on many a well-contested field. His famous match
with the Duke of Hamilton was long remembered in sporting
annals. Both noblemen rode their own horses, and each was
supported by numerous partisans. The contest took place on the
race-ground at Newmarket, and attracted all the fashionables of
the period. Lord March, thin, agile, and admirably qualified
for exertion, was the victor. Still more celebrated was his
Lordship’s wager with the famous Count O’Taafe. During a
conversation at a convivial meeting on the subject of ‘running
against time,’ it was suggested by Lord March, that it was
possible for a carriage to be drawn with a degree of celerity
previously unexampled, and believed to be impossible. Being
desired to name his maximum, he undertook, provided choice of
ground were given him and a certain period for training, to
draw a carriage with four wheels not less than nineteen miles
within the space of sixty minutes. The accomplishment of such
rapidity staggered the belief of his hearers; and a heavy wager
was the consequence. Success mainly depending on the lightness
of the carriage, Wright of Long Acre, the most ingenious
coach-builder of the day, devoted the whole resources of his
skill to its construction, and produced a vehicle formed partly
of wood and partly of whale-bone, with silk harness, that came
up to the wishes of his employer. Four blood horses of approved
speed were then selected, and the course at Newmarket chosen as
the ground of contest. On the day appointed, 29th of August,
1750, noble and ignoble gamesters journeyed from far and near
to witness the wonderful experiment; excitement reached the
highest point, and bets to an enormous amount were made. At
length the jockeys mounted; the carriage was put in motion, and
rushing on with a velocity marvelous in those times of coach
traveling, but easily conceived by us railway travelers of the
nineteenth century, gained within the stipulated hour the goal
of victory.”

THE DECAY OF GREAT FAMILIES.

Not the least valuable parts of Burke’s just published
“Anecdotes of the Aristocracy,” are a species of essay on the
fortunes of families. The following is from a chapter on their
decadence:

“It has often occurred to us that a very interesting paper
might be written on the rise and fall of English families.
Truly does Dr. Borlase remark that ‘the most lasting houses
have only their seasons, more or less, of a certain
constitutional strength. They have their spring and summer
sunshine glare, their wane, decline, and death.’ Take, for
example, the Plantagenets, the Staffords, and the
[pg 261] Nevills, the three most
illustrious names on the roll of England’s nobility. What
race in Europe surpassed in royal position, in personal
achievement, our Henries and our Edwards? and yet we find
the great-great-grandson of Margaret Plantagenet, daughter
and heiress of George Duke of Clarence, following the craft
of a cobbler at the little town of Newport in Shropshire, in
the year 1637. Beside, if we were to investigate the
fortunes of many of the inheritors of the royal arms, it
would soon be discovered that

‘The aspiring blood of Lancaster’

had sunk into the ground. The princely stream at the present
time flows through very humble veins. Among the lineal
descendants of Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, sixth son of
Edward I., King of England, entitled to quarter the Royal arms,
occur Mr. Joseph Smart, of Hales Owen, butcher, and Mr. George
Wilmot, keeper of the turnpike-gate at Cooper’s Bank, near
Dudley; and among the descendants of Thomas Plantagenet, Duke
of Gloucester, fifth son of Edward III., we may mention Mr.
Stephen James Penny, the late sexton at St. George’s, Hanover
Square.

“The story of the Gargraves is a melancholy chapter in the
romance of real life. For full two centuries, or more, scarcely
a family in Yorkshire enjoyed a higher position. Its chiefs
earned distinction in peace and war; one died in France, Master
of the Ordnance to King Henry V.; another, a soldier, too, fell
with Salisbury, at the siege of Orleans; and a third filled the
Speaker’s chair of the House of Commons. What an awful contrast
to this fair picture does the sequel offer. Thomas Gargrave,
the Speaker’s eldest son, was hung at York, for murder; and his
half-brother, Sir Richard, endured a fate only less miserable.
The splendid estate he inherited he wasted by the most wanton
extravagance, and at length reduced himself to abject want.
‘His excesses,’ says Mr. Hunter, in his ‘History of Doncaster,’
‘are still, at the expiration of two centuries, the subject of
village tradition; and his attachment to gaming is commemorated
in an old painting, long preserved in the neighboring mansion
of Badsworth, in which he is represented as playing at the old
game of put, the right hand against the left, for the stake of
a cup of ale.

“The close of Sir Richard’s story is as lamentable as its
course. An utter bankrupt in means and reputation, he is stated
to have been reduced to travel with the pack-horses to London,
and was at last found dead in an old hostelry! He had married
Catherine, sister of Lord Danvers, and by her left three
daughters. Of the descendants of his brothers few particulars
can be ascertained. Not many years since, a Mr. Gargrave,
believed to be one of them, filled the mean employment of
parish-clerk of Kippax.

“A similar melancholy narrative applies to another great
Yorkshire house. Sir William Reresby, Bart., son and heir of
the celebrated author, succeeded, at the death of his father,
in 1689, to the beautiful estate of Thrybergh, in Yorkshire,
where his ancestors had been seated uninterruptedly from the
time of the Conquest; and he lived to see himself denuded of
every acre of his broad lands. Le Neve states, in his MSS.
preserved in the Heralds’ College, that he became a tapster in
the King’s Bench Prison, and was tried and imprisoned for
cheating in 1711. He was alive in 1727, when Wootton’s account
of the Baronets was published. In that work he is said to be
reduced to a low condition. At length he died in great
obscurity, a melancholy instance how low pursuits and base
pleasures may sully the noblest name, and waste an estate
gathered with labor and preserved by the care of a race of
distinguished progenitors. Gaming was amongst Sir William’s
follies—particularly that lowest specimen of the folly,
the fights of game-cocks. The tradition at Thrybergh is (for
his name is not quite forgotten) that the fine estate of
Dennaby was staked and lost on a single main. Sir William
Reresby was not the only baronet who disgraced his order at
that period. In 1722, Sir Charles Burton was tried at the Old
Bailey for stealing a seal; pleaded poverty, but was found
guilty, and sentenced to transportation; which sentence was
afterward commuted for a milder punishment.”

MADRID AND THE SPANISH SENATE.

Gazpacho; or, Summer Months in Spain, is the title of a new
book by W. George Clark, published in London. Gazpacho, it
seems, is the name of a dish peculiar to Spain, but of
universal use there, a sort of cold soup, made up of familiars
and handy things, as bread, pot-herbs, oil, and water. “My
Gazpacho,” says the author, “has been prepared after a similar
receipt. I know not how it will please the more refined and
fastidious palates to which it will be submitted; indeed, amid
the multitude of dainties wherewith the table is loaded, it may
well remain untasted.” It at least deserves a better fate than
that. The volume relates, in a pleasant, intelligent, and
gossiping way, a summer’s ramble through Spain, describing with
considerable force the peculiarities of its people, and the
romantic features by which it is marked. The clever painter
could not have better materials. The party-colored costumes of
the peasants, like dahlias at a Chiswick show; the somber
garments of the priests, the fine old churches, the queer
rambling houses, looking centuries old, the dull, gloomy
streets of Madrid, the life and activity of the market-place.
Such are the objects upon which the eye rests, and of which Mr.
Clark was too observant to neglect any. The following passages
will give an idea of the materials of which the Gazpacho is
made up:—

MADRID.

“I left, I suppose, scarcely a street in Madrid which I did
not traverse, or a church which I did not enter. The result is
hardly worth the trouble. One street and church
[pg 262] are exactly like another
street and church. In the latter, one always finds the same
profusion of wooden Christs, and Madonnas in real
petticoats, on the walls, and the same scanty sprinkling of
worshipers, also in petticoats, on the floor. The images
outnumber the devotees here, as in all other Roman Catholic
countries (except Ireland, which is an exception to every
rule.) To a stranger, the markets are always the most
interesting haunts. A Spaniard, he or she, talks more while
making the daily bargain than in all the rest of the
twenty-four hours. The fruit and vegetable market was my
especial lounge. There is such a fresh, sweet smell of the
country, and the groups throw themselves, or are thrown,
into such pretty tableaux after the Rubens and Snyders
fashion. The shambles one avoids instinctively, and
fish-market there is none, for Madrid is fifty hours’
journey from the nearest sea, and the Manzanares has every
requisite for a fine trout stream, but water.

“Madrid has one peculiarity which conduces very much to the
visitor’s comfort, namely, that there are very few inevitable
‘sights’ to be gone through. The armory said to be the finest
in the world; the palace, ditto (which people who are addicted
to upholstering may go and see, if they don’t mind breaking the
tenth commandment); the museum of natural history, where is the
largest loadstone in active operation between this and Medina;
and the Academia, nearly complete the list. Everybody should
devote a morning to the last-named, were it only for the sake
of the Murillos. The famous picture of ‘St. Isabel giving alms
to the sick’ has been arrested at Madrid on its return from
Paris to Seville. As the Sevilians have instituted a ‘process’
for its recovery, it is likely to stay there for some time
longer. ‘The Patrician’s Dream’ is quite cheering to look upon,
so rich and glowing it is. Shut your eyes to the semi-ludicrous
effect of husband, wife, and dog, in a decreasing series, like
the three genders in Lindley Murray, all asleep.

“The gardens of the queen, sunk in a deep hollow below the
palace, deserve a visit. The head-gardener, of course a
Frenchman, struggles gallantly against all kinds of
difficulties of soil, climate, and lack of water. By a series
of ingenious artifices he has concocted a plot of grass, some
ten feet square, to the great astonishment of all natives.”

NARVAEZ IN THE SENATE.

“One day my kind friend Colonel S. took me to hear a debate
in the Senado, the Spanish Chamber of Peers, which holds
its sittings in the chapel of a suppressed convent, near the
palace. By dint of paint, gilding, and carpets, the room has
been divested of its sanctified aspect, and made to look like a
handsome modern room. They have not thought it necessary that a
place in which a hundred gentlemen in surtouts meet to discuss
secular matters in this nineteenth century, should be made to
resemble a chapel of the fifteenth. Antiquity is here
represented in the person of two halberdiers, who stand to
guard the door, dressed in extravagant costume, like beefeaters
in full bloom. Rows of raised seats extend on each side of the
room; in the center, facing the beef-eaters, are the chair and
desk of the president, and on each side a little tribune, from
which the clerks read out documents from time to time. The
spectators are accommodated in niches round the walls. Each
member speaks from his place, and the voting is by ballot.
First a footman hands round a tray of beans, and then each
advances, when his name is called, to a table in the center,
where he drops his bean into the box. The beans are then
counted, and the result proclaimed by the president. On the
right of the chair, in the front, is the bench assigned to the
ministers; and there I had the good luck to see Narvaez,
otherwise called Duke of Valencia, and a great many fine names
besides, and, in reality, master of all the Spains. His face
wears a fixed expression of inflexible resolve, very effective,
and garnished with a fierce dyed mustache, and a somewhat
palpable wig to match. His style of dress was what, in an
inferior man, one would have called ‘dandified.’ An
unexceptionable surtout, opened to display a white waistcoat
with sundry chains, and the extremities terminated,
respectively, in patent leather and primrose kid. During the
discussion he alternately fondled a neat riding-whip and aired
a snowy pocket-handkerchief. Those who know him give him credit
for good intentions and great courage, but do not expect that
he will ever set the Thames on fire, whatever he may do to the
Manzanares. He is a mixture, they say, of the chivalric and the
asinine: a kind of moral mule. His personal weakness is a wish
to be thought young, and hence he was naturally angry when Lord
Palmerston wanted to give him a ‘wrinkle.’ I saw, likewise,
Mon, the Minister of Finance, smiling complacently, like a
shopkeeper on his customers; and the venerable Castanos, Duke
of Bailen, who, as he tottered in, stooping under the weight of
ninety years, was affectionately greeted by Narvaez and others.
On the whole, the debate seemed to be languid, and to be
listened to with little interest; but that is the general fate
of debates in July.”

THE KANASZ.

Of the Servian swineherd we have heard something of late,
both in history and romance; because this was the vocation of
Kara George, the Servian Liberator. In Hungary the swine-keeper
does not seem to be so respectable a person. Here is a sketch
of him from Max Schlesinger’s new book on the Hungarian
war:

“The Kanasz is a swineherd, whose occupation, everywhere
unpoetical and dirty, is doubly troublesome and dirty in
Hungary. Large droves of pigs migrate annually into the latter
country from Serbia, where they still live in a half-wild
state. In Hungary [pg 263] they fatten in the
extensive oak-forests, and are sent to market in the large
towns, even to Vienna, and still further….

“It is a true enjoyment to live in these shady forests. The
oak attains a finer and more luxuriant growth on the Hungarian
soil than in any part of Germany. The hogs find food in
profusion, and commonly stuff themselves to such a degree that
they lose all desire for roving about: so that dog, master, and
ass, lead a comparatively easy life, and are left to the quiet
enjoyment of nature. But the lot of the Kanasz is a pitiable
one when, at the close of summer, he has to drive his swine to
market. From Debreczin, nay even from the Serbian frontier, he
has to make a journey on foot more toilsome than was ever
undertaken by the most adventurous traveler, pacing slowly over
the interminable heaths in rain, storm, or under a burning sun,
behind his pigs, which drive into his face hot clouds of dust.
Every now and then a hog has stuffed itself so full as to be
unable to stir from the spot; and there it lies on the road
without moving, whilst the whole caravan is obliged to wait for
half a day or longer, until the glutted animal can get on his
legs again; and when at length this feat is accomplished,
frequently his neighbor begins the same trick. There is truly
not a more toilsome business in the wide world than that of a
Kanasz…. The fokos is a hatchet, with a long handle, which
the Kanasz hurls with great dexterity. Whenever he desires to
pick out and slaughter one of his hogs, either for his own use
or for sale, the attempt would be attended with danger, in the
half-savage state of these animals, without such a weapon. The
fokos here assists him; which he flings with such force and
precision, that the sharp iron strikes exactly into the center
of the frontal bone of the animal he has marked out; the victim
sinks on the earth without uttering a sound, and the drove
quietly proceeds on its way. That he can strike down a man with
equal precision at eighty to a hundred paces, is proved by the
gallows at the entrance of the forest—the three-legged
monument of his dexterity. During recent events, too, the
surgeons of the Austrian army will readily furnish the Kanasz
and Csikos with certificates of their ability and skill.”

THE “WILD HUSSAR” OF HUNGARY.

France, Russia, Prussia, and other countries, have
introduced the Hussars into their armies; but these soldiers
are merely Russian, French, and Prussian cavalry, dressed in
the Hungarian laced jacket: they want the spirit, the horse,
and—the ‘Magyar Isten.’ For this reason, the Hungarian
Hussar will not acknowledge them as brethren; and whenever he
comes in contact with foreign Hussars, he lets them feel in
battle the full force of his contempt. A story is told, that
during a campaign against the French in the war with Napoleon,
the bivouacs of the Prussian and Hungarian Hussars were near to
one another. A Prussian came over to his neighbors in a
familiar way with a glass of wine, and drank it to the health
of his ‘brother hussar.’ But the Hungarian gently pushed the
glass back, and stroked his beard, saying, ‘What
brother?—no brother—I hussar—you
jack-pudding.’

This expression is not to be mistaken for a brag. The
Hungarian hussar is no fanfaron like the French chasseur, but
he is conscious of his own powers, like a Grenadier of the Old
Imperial Guard. The dolmany, the csako, and the csizma, have
grown to his body; they form his holyday dress even when off
duty—the national costume transferred into the army; and
as he is aware that this is not the case in other countries,
the foreign Hussar’s dress is in his eyes a mere servant’s
livery; and logically the man is not altogether wrong.

The Hussar, like the Magyars in general, is naturally
good-tempered. The finest man in the service, he is at the same
time the most jovial companion in the tavern, and will not sit
by and empty his glass by himself when a Bohemian or German
comrade at his side has spent all his money. There is only one
biped under the sun who is in his eyes more contemptible and
hateful than any animal of marsh or forest. This is the
Banderial Hussar—that half-breed between Croat and
Magyar, that caricature of the true Hussar, who serves in the
cavalry, as the Croat in the infantry, of the Military
Frontier. Never was an Hungarian Hussar known to drink with a
Banderial Hussar; never will he sit at the same table: if he
meets a snake he crushes it under foot—a wolf he will
hunt in the mountains—with a buffalo he will fight on the
open heath—with a miserable horse-stealer he will wrestle
for a halter; but as for the Banderial Hussar, he spits in his
face wherever he meets him.

It was at Hatvan, or at Tapjo-Bicske, that Hungarian and
Banderial Hussars were for the first time in this war—the
first time perhaps in the recollection of man—opposed to
one another in battle. If looks could slay, there would have
been no need of a conflict, for the eyes of the Magyars shot
death and contempt at their unworthy adversaries. The signal of
attack sounded; and at the same instant, as if seized by one
common thought, the Hungarian Hussars clattered their heavy
sabres back into the scabbard, and with a fearful imprecation,
such as no German tongue could echo, charged weaponless and at
full speed their mimic caricatures whom fate had thrown in
their way. The shock was so irresistible, that the poor Croats
could make no use of their sabers against the furious onset of
their unarmed foe: they were beaten down from their saddles
with the fist, and dragged off their horses by their dolmanys;
those who could save themselves fled. The Hussars disdained to
pursue them; but they complained to their Colonel at having
been opposed to ‘such a rabble.’—Schlesinger.

Original Poetry.

A HOROSCOPE.

BY ELIZABETH OAKES SMITH.

BROOKLYN, August, 1850.

FRIENDSHIP.

August. WILLIAM C. RICHARDS.

THE BALANCE OF LIFE.

May, 1850. HERMA.

Science.

The SPANISH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES have announced the following
subject for competition: “An experimental investigation and
explanation of the theory of nitrification, the causes which
most influence the production of this phenomenon, and the means
most conducive in Spain to natural nitrification.” The prize,
to be awarded in May 1851, is to be a gold medal and 6000
copper reals—about seventy pounds sterling; and a second
similar medal will be given to the second best paper. The
papers, written in Spanish or Latin, are to be sent in before
the 1st May, with, as usual, the author’s name under seal.

IMPROVEMENTS IN THE TELEGRAPH.—The Presse gives
some account of experiments made at the house of M. de
Girardin, in Paris, with a new telegraphic dictionary, the
invention of M. Gonon. Dispatches in French, English,
Portuguese, Russian, and Latin, including proper names of men
and places, and also figures, were transmitted and translated,
says this account, with a rapidity and fidelity alike
marvelous, by an officer who knew nothing of any one of the
languages used except his own. Dots, commas, accents, and
breaks were all in their places. This dictionary of M. Gonon is
applicable alike to electric and aerial telegraphy, to
transmissions by night and by day, to maritime and to military
telegraphing. The same paper speaks of the great interest
excited in the European capitals by the approaching experiment
of submarine telegraphic communication between England and
France. The wires, it says, on the English side are deposited
and ready for laying down. It is probable that in a very few
days the experiment will be complete.

Authors and Books.

NEW ORLEANS AS SEEN BY A GERMAN PRINCE is very naturally not
quite the same city as in the opinion of her own
pleasure-loving citizens, nor can the republic whose
South-western metropolis is condemned with the rigidity of a
merciless judge and the jaundice of an unfriendly traveler,
hope to get clear of censure from the same super-royal pen. It
seems that his serenest highness Major-General Duke Paul
William, of Wirtemburg, is traveling in America, and that the
Ausland, a weekly paper, of Stuttgart, is from time to
time favored with the results of his experience on the way.
From some recent portions of his correspondence The
International translates the subjoined morceau,
which, however, despite its great exaggeration, is not
altogether devoid of truth: “It is not necessary here to
mention how much New Orleans has altered, increased, and
deteriorated, for it is an established thing that cities which
grow to such gigantic proportions gain nothing in respect to
the morals of their inhabitants. Here drunkenness and gambling,
two vices of which the Americans were ignorant in the time of
the founders of their great federation, have taken very deep
root. The decrease of the inflexible spirit of religion, and
the increase of vice and luxury, gnaw the powerful tree, and
are fearful enemies, which cannot be resisted by a structure
that might resist with scorn all foreign foes, and would have
played a mighty part in the world’s history had the spirit of
Washington and Franklin remained with it. The annexation of
Texas, the war with Mexico, and now the gold of California,
have transformed the United States. A people which makes
conquests, loses inward power in proportion to the
aggrandizement of its volume, and the increase of its external
enemies.”

AN ARABIAN NEWSPAPER, with the title Mobacher. has
lately been commenced in Algiers, at the expense of the French
Government. It is edited in the cabinet of the
Governor-General, issued weekly, and lithographed, as less
expensive than printing, which in Arabic types would be quite
costly. It contains political news from Europe and Africa, the
latest advices from Constantinople, all those laws and decrees
of the Government which in any way concern the Arabs, and
descriptions of such new discoveries and inventions as can be
made intelligible to the readers for whom it is designed. A
thousand copies are printed weekly and sent to the chiefs and
headmen of all the tribes that are under French rule or
influence. At first it was not read much, but now the vanity of
the Arabs has been excited by it as a mark of special attention
from the Governor-General, so that they take it as an honor,
and a degree of curiosity has been excited to obtain news from
other parts of the world.

Within a short time, also, an additional importance has been
given to the paper by the publication in it of the amount of
the tribute which each tribe is required to pay to France.
Formerly this was known only to the chiefs who would
accordingly exact from their people whatever amount they deemed
best, under the pretense that it was for the government, while
the greater part was retained by themselves. These tribes have
profited greatly by the French conquest; it is estimated that
of the eighty millions of francs which the army in Algeria
costs yearly, from twenty to twenty-five millions remain in the
hands of the Arabs. The Arab sells his corn, dates, horses,
sheep, the baskets he weaves, &c., to the European
population, but never buys anything from them in turn, except
it be arms and powder. The rest of his money he carries home
and buries where no one knows but himself, so that, if he dies
suddenly, it is lost. Only the chiefs of the tribe know how to
extort anything of these hidden sums. According to the most
moderate estimates the tribes must have from two to three
hundred millions of French money. The gains which the chiefs
draw from this wealth is considerable; some of them have from a
hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand francs income. They are
beginning to build large houses, and cultivate gardens around
them, a disposition which the government favors, because it is
easier to keep tribes in order that are settled and have
dwellings to lose which they cannot take with them. The
publication of the tribute in the Mobacher, is, under
these circumstances, of great value for the Arabs, because it
enables them, as it were, to supervise their chiefs, and to
refuse to pay exorbitant taxes laid under pretense of a high
tribute. This has increased the respect generally felt for the
paper, though it has not rendered it more a favorite with the
chiefs. The power of these leaders is very great in the various
tribes, having been in most cases hereditary, at least since
the tenth century, and although not always inherited in direct
line, the tribes have never suffered it to pass into the hands
of new families. Hitherto nothing has diminished it; the war
rather gave it new strength, and it is only by means of the
chiefs that the French can keep Algiers quiet. It would be a
remarkable fact if the dissolving power of publicity through
the press should be manifested here as elsewhere, and begin the
overthrow of the long standing influence exercised by the great
Arabian families.

MRS. M. ST. LEON LOUD, of Philadelphia, has in the press of
Ticknor, Reed & Fields, of Boston, a collection of her
poems, entitled, “Wayside Flowers.” Mrs. Loud is a writer of
much grace and elegance, and occasionally of a rich and
delicate fancy. The late Mr. Poe was accustomed to praise her
works very highly, and was to have edited this edition of
them.

THE LITERATURE OF SOCIALISM occupies the press in France.
The subject is warmly debated, pro and con. In a
pamphlet called Despotisme ou Socialisme, M. Pompery
rapidly sketches the alternative which, he says, lies open to
those who rise against despotism. There are but two religious
doctrines according to him: the one absolutist, represented by
De Maistre, and the Catholic school, which is, logically
enough, desirous of reestablishing the Inquisition; the other
professed by all the illustrious teachers of mankind, by
Pythagoras, Jesus, Socrates, Pascal, &c., which, believing
in the goodness of the Creator and the perfectibility of man,
endeavors to found upon earth the reign of justice, fraternity,
and equality. A more important work on Socialism is that of Dr.
Guepin, of Nantes, Philosophie du Socialisme; and M.
Lecouturier announces a Science du Socialisme.

MR. G.P.R. JAMES has taken a cottage at Jamaica, Long
Island, and is domiciliated as an American—we hope for a
long time. He has made troops of friends since his arrival
here, and is likely to be as popular in society as he has long
been in literature. We are sure we communicate a very pleasing
fact when we state that it is his intention to give in two or
three of our principal cities, during the autumn and fall, a
series of lectures—probably upon the chivalric ages, with
which no one is more profoundly familiar, and of which no one
can discourse more wisely or agreeably. His abilities, his
reputation, and the almost universal acquaintance with his
works, insure for him the largest success. We are indebted to
no other living author for so much enjoyment, and by his
proposed lectures he will not only add to our obligations, but
furnish an opportunity to repair in some degree the wrong he
has suffered from the imperfection and injustice of our
copyright system.

“THE LIFE, CHARACTER, AND GENIUS OF EBENEZER ELLIOTT,” is a
volume by January Searle, author of Leaves from Sherwood
Forest, &c., who knew the corn-law rhymer well, and has
been enabled to give very characteristic sketches, original
descriptions, correspondence, &c. There are in it many
judiciously selected specimens of Elliott’s poems, prose
productions, and lectures. Mr. Searle observes of him, that “he
was cradled into poetry by human wrong and misery; and was
emphatically the bard of poverty—singing of the poor
man’s loves and sorrows, and denouncing his oppressors.” Again:
“He has one central idea—terrible and awful in its
aspect, although beautiful and beneficent in
spirit—before which he tries all causes, and men, and
things. It is the Eternal Idea of Right; his synonyme of God.
And this idea is perpetually present in his mind, pervades all
his thoughts, will not be shuffled nor cheated, but demands a
full satisfaction from all violators of it.”

THE LATE MRS. OSGOOD was in a very remarkable degree
respected and beloved by those who were admitted to her
acquaintance. Without envy or jealousy, or any of the
immoralities of the intellect which most commonly beset writers
of her sex, she occasioned no enmities and was a party to none,
but was regarded, especially by the literary women of this
country, with a feeling of tenderness and devotion probably
unparalleled in the annals of literature or of society.
Immediately after her death, therefore, a desire was manifested
to illustrate the common regard for her by some suitable
testimonial, and upon consultation, it was decided to publish a
splendid souvenir, to consist of the gratuitous contributions
of her friends, and with the profits accruing from its sale to
erect a monument to her memory in the cemetery of Mount Auburn.
This gift book, edited by Mrs. Osgood’s most intimate friend,
Mary E. Hewitt, will be published by Mr. Putnam, on the first
of October, under the title of The Cairn, and it will
contain original articles by George Aubrey, Lord Bishop of
Jamaica: the Right Rev. George W. Doane, the Right Rev. Alonzo
Potter, the Hon. R.H. Walworth, the Hon. J. Leander Starr, the
Rev. C.S. Henry, D.D., G.P.R. James, Esq., N.P. Willis, Esq.,
W. Gilmore Simms, Esq., Bayard Taylor, Esq., J.H. Boker, Esq.,
Alfred B. Street, Esq., R. H. Stoddard, Esq., Miss Fredrika
Bremer, Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Oakes Smith, Mrs. Embury, Mrs.
Lewis, Mrs. Neal, Mrs. Willard, Mrs. Whitman, Miss Lynch, Miss
Hunter, Miss Cheesebro’, and indeed nearly all the writers of
her sex who have attained any eminence in our literary world.
The volume will be illustrated with nine engravings on steel,
by Cheney and other eminent artists.

THE REV. WALTER COLTON has just published through A.S.
Barnes & Co. “Three Years in California,” a journal of
experiences and observations in the gold region, from the
period when it first attracted the attention of the Atlantic
cities. Mr. Colton was some time alcade of Monterey, and he had
in every way abundant opportunity to acquire whatever facts are
deserving of preservation in history. His “Ship and Shore,”
“Constantinople and Athens,” “Deck and Port,” and other works,
have illustrated his genial temper, shrewdness, and skill in
description and character writing; and this book will increase
his reputation for these qualities. It contains portraits of
Capt. Sutter, Col. Fremont, Mr. Gwin, Mr. Wright, Mr. Larkin,
and Mr. Snyder, a map of the valley of the Sacramento, and
several other engravings, very spirited in design and
execution.

MR. GEORGE STEPHENS, author of the “Manuscripts of
Erdely,” has been struck by ill health and reduced to
poverty, and an amateur play has been prepared for his benefit
at the Soho Theater. He wrote “The Vampire,” “Montezuma,” and
“Martinuzzi.”

The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, conducted by Mr.
Lester, continues with every number to increase in interest.
The work is designed to embrace folio portraits, engraved by
Davignon, from daguerreotypes by Brady, of twenty-four of the
most eminent American citizens who have lived since the time of
Washington. The portraits thus far have been admirable for
truthfulness and artistic effect. It may be said that the
only published pictures we have, deserving to be called
portraits, of the historian Prescott, or Mr. Calhoun, or
Colonel Fremont, are in this Gallery. The great artist,
naturalist, and man of letters, Audubon, is reflected here as
he appears at the close of the battle, receiving the reverence
of nations and ages. In the biographical department Mr. Lester
has evinced very eminent abilities for this kind of writing. He
seizes the prominent events of history and the strong points of
character, and presents them with such force and fullness, and
happy combination, as to make the letter-press as interesting
and valuable as the engraved portion of the work. We are
pleased to learn that the Gallery is remarkably successful. No
publication of equal splendor and expensiveness has ever before
been so well received in this country. The cost of it is but
one dollar per number, or twenty dollars for the series of
twenty-four numbers. It is now half completed.

M. Max Schlesinger, author of “The War in Hungary, in
1848-9,”—a work which, from what we read of it in the
foreign journals, is much the most striking and attractive of
all that have appeared upon its subject in English,—is
described in the Athenæum, as by birth a Hungarian, by
the accidents of fortune a German. For some time a resident in
Prague, and more recently settled in Berlin, he has had
excellent opportunities of seeing the men and studying the
questions connected both in the literary and political sense
with the present movement of ideas and races in Eastern Europe.
His acquaintance with the aspects of nature in his native
land—his knowledge of the peculiar character of its
inhabitants, their manners, modes of thought and habits of
life—his familiarity with past history—his right
conception of the leading men in the recent struggle—are
all vouched for as “essentially accurate” by no less an
authority than Count Pulszky. It would be an injustice merely
to say that M. Schlesinger has given in an original and
picturesque way a general view of the course of events in the
late war, more complete and connected than is afforded in any
account hitherto presented to the public. He has done more: he
has enabled the German and English reader to understand the
miracle of a nation of four or five millions of men rising up
at the command of a great statesman, and doing successful
battle with the elaborately organized power of a first-class
European state, shaking it to its very foundations, and
contending, not without hope, against two mighty military
empires,—until the treachery from within paralyzed its
power of resistance.

Dr. Mayo’s new novel, “The Berber, or the Mountaineer of the
Atlas,” published by Putnam, promises to be scarcely less
popular than his “Kaloolah.” The Evening Post says of
it: “Kaloolah was a sprightly narrative of the wanderings of a
Yankee, who seemed to combine in his person the characteristics
of Robinson Crusoe with those of Baron Munchausen; but the
Berber professes to be nothing more than a novel; or, as the
author says in his preface, his principal object has been to
tell an agreeable story in an agreeable way. In doing so,
however, an eye has been had to the illustration of Moorish
manners, customs, history, and geography; to the
exemplification of Moorish life as it actually is in Barbary in
the present day, and not as it usually appears in the vague and
poetic glamour of the common Moorish romance. It has also been
an object to introduce to the acquaintance of the reader a
people who have played a most important part in the world’s
history, but of whom very few educated people know anything
more than the name. As Dr. Mayo has traveled extensively over
the regions he describes, we presume that his descriptions may
be taken as true. His account of the Berbers, a tribe of
ancient Asiatic origin, who inhabit a range of the Atlas, and
who live a semi-savage life like the Arabs, is minute, and to
the intelligent reader quite as interesting as the more
narrative parts of the work. It is, perhaps, the best evidence
of the merits of the book, that the whole first edition was
exhausted by orders from the country before the first number
had appeared in the city.”

Col. Forbes, who was in Italy during the revolution, and
many years previous, and who was himself, both in a military
and civic capacity, one of the actors in that event, the
Evening Post informs us, is about to give public
lectures on the subject of Italy in the various cities and
towns of the United States. Col. Forbes was intimately
connected with the revolutionary chiefs during the brief
existence of the Roman Republic, and was directly and
confidently employed by Mazzini. His knowledge of the country,
its people, its politics, and its recent history, will supply
him with materials for making his lectures highly interesting
and instructive.

The Gem of the Western World, edited by Mrs. Hewitt, and
published by Cornish & Co., Fulton street, is a very
beautiful gift-book, and in its literary character is deserving
of a place with the most splendid and; tasteful annuals of the
season. Mrs. Hewitt’s own contributions to it embrace some of
her finest compositions, and are of course among its most
brilliant contents.

FRENCH PERIODICALS.—A Parisian correspondent of the
London Literary Gazette observes, that if we exclude the
Revue des Deux Mondes—a, sort of cross between the
English Quarterly and the monthlies,—if we exclude
also a few dry scientific periodicals, and one or two
theatrical or musical newspapers, we shall seek in vain for any
Quarterly, or Blackwood, or Art Union, or
Literary Gazette; and that even the periodicals and
journals which make the nearest approach to the weekly,
monthly, or quarterly publications of England, are either
wretched compilations, or abominably ill-written and
ill-printed. The feuilleton system of the newspapers is
no doubt the principal cause of the periodical literature being
in such an extremely low condition. But though literary and
scientific periodicals be, generally speaking, vile in quality,
they can at least boast of quantity. There are, it seems, not
fewer than 300 of one kind or another published in Paris alone.
Among them are 44 devoted to medicine, chemistry, natural
science, &c.; 42, trade, commerce, railways,
advertisements; 34, fashions; 30, law; 22, administration,
public works, roads, bridges, mines; 19, archæology, history,
biography, geography, numismatics; 19, public instruction and
education; 15, agriculture and horticulture; 8, bibliography
and typography; 10, army and navy; 7, literary; the rest
theatrical, musical, or of a character too hybrid to be
classified.

THE ILLUSTRATED DOMESTIC BIBLE, edited by the Rev. Ingram
Cobbin, seems to us decidedly the best family Bible ever
offered to the trade in this country. It is printed with
remarkable correctness and beauty; illustrated with a very
large number of maps and engravings on wood; and its notes,
written with much condensation and perspicuity, are such as are
necessary for the understanding of the text. Indeed, all that
is added to the letter of the Bible is legitimate and necessary
illustration. It is being published in a series of
twenty-five numbers, at twenty-five cents each, by S. Hueston,
publisher of The Knickerbocker, Nassau-street.

THE VIENNA UNIVERSITY, long one of the best in Europe, has
not been reopened since the insurrection of November, 1848, its
principal edifice having been occupied as barracks for a
regiment of soldiers. It is now proposed to restore it to its
proper use, but great difficulty is experienced in finding
professors. The old ones are scattered, some as exiles in
foreign countries, on account of democratic
opinions,—some in prison for the same reason, others
employed elsewhere. Wackernagel, the eminent professor of the
German Language and Literature at Basle, Switzerland, tempted
by liberal offers, had promised to come to Vienna, and lend the
aid of his reputation and talents to the restoration of the
University, but being lately at Milan, on a wedding tour, as he
and his wife were passing through the Piazza d’Armi,
their ears were saluted by cries of pain, which on inquiry they
found to proceed from sundry rebellious Italians, of both
sexes, who were receiving each from twenty-five to fifty blows
of the military baton, or cane, employed by the Austrians in
flogging soldiers. Madame Wackernagel at once declared that she
would never willingly inhabit a country whose laws and habits
suffered women to be so brutally punished for patriotism, and
her husband could only agree with her. He has accordingly
broken off the engagement, and the Government cannot hope to
supply his place.

HINCKS ON LITERARY LARCENY.—A Canadian friend sends us
the following extract from a speech by Francis Hincks, a
leading member of the Canadian Ministry, touching the
International Copyright question:

“The American publisher steals the works of British
authors, because he is immoral enough to do it, because he
is scoundrel enough, and the nation is scoundrel enough to
permit it. (Ironical cheers.) Yes, because the nation is
scoundrel enough to permit it.”

Our unknown friend who sends us this wants us to give Hincks
a thorough roasting for it, and evidently expects every hair on
our head to bristle with indignation. Now we have not the least
objection to roasting the Minister aforesaid, and will do it
when a fair chance presents itself, but we don’t consider this
such a chance. In fact, though we think Francis has drawn
rather a strong draught from “the well of English undefiled,”
yet essentially we regard his observations above quoted as
rather more than half right. It is rascally to steal a
man’s book, print it, sell it, read it, and refuse him any pay
for the labor of writing it; and we don’t see that his being an
Englishman makes any material difference. There may be a
cheaper way to get the proceeds of another man’s toil than by
paying for it, but we don’t think there is any other strictly
honest way.—Tribune.

HERR SCHUMANN’s opera, “Généviève,” was produced at Leipsic
on the 28th ultimo. “This work,” says the Gazette
Musicale, “after having been much recommended beforehand,
does not seem to have satisfied public expectation, being
concert music, without any dramatic force.” For the verdict
which will finally be passed on “Généviève” every one must be
curious who has at all followed the journals of Young Germany
in the recent crusades which they nave made, not so much to
establish Schumann as a great composer, as to prove him greater
than Mendelssohn.

THE GRAND LITERARY TRADE SALES are now in progress in New
York: and the catalogues of the rival houses are the largest
ever printed. Cooley & Keese at their splendid hall in
Broadway present this year a richer and more extensive series
of invoices than has ever before been sold in America.

The Fine Arts.

Bavaria is a sort of artists’ paradise, both the late King
Louis and the present Maximilian being determined to leave
behind them the glory of munificent patrons of art. In this
they have so far succeeded, that Munich, which before their
time was by no means among German cities the most worthy a
traveler’s attention, may now dispute the palm even with
Dresden, notwithstanding the unrivaled gallery of paintings,
possessed by the latter. For students of modern art, and
especially of the German schools, Munich is incomparable, while
its collection of ancient sculptures cannot be equaled out of
Italy. We now learn that King Maximilian has conceived the plan
of a grand series of pictures to comprehend the prominent
epochs and events of history. The most eminent German and
foreign artists are to be invited to assist in carrying out
this immense undertaking; so that thus the series will not only
represent the great experiences of mankind, but will, it is
hoped, contain specimens of all the great schools of modern
painting.

An exhibition of indisputable works by the old painters is
now open at Valenciennes, in France. It consists of pictures
belonging to the family of the Belgian general Rottiers. They
are for sale, either single or together. Among them is a St.
Denis, bearing his Head, by Rubens, said to have been painted
by order of Pope Urban VIII. It was deposited in the Convent of
the Annunciades, at Antioch; in 1747, Louis XV. offered
100,000 francs for it, but was refused, the convent having no
right to dispose of it. Afterward, on the suppression of the
convent, it fell into the hands of the family to which it now
belongs. The exhibition also contains a landscape by Salvator
Rosa, representing a scene in the Appenines; a Magdalen
kneeling in a Cavern, by Kneller; two Allegories, by Giulio
Romano; several portraits by Rubens and Van Dyke, besides other
works of less value.

Darley’s “Sleepy Hollow.”—The London Art Journal, for
July, has the following notice of Mr. Darley’s illustrations of
Irving’s “Legends of Sleepy Hollow,” published by the
American Art Union: “The charmingly quaint original
legend told with so much quiet humor by Washington Irving, is
here illustrated by a native artist in a congenial spirit, and
his scenes realized in a manner which must give its author
satisfaction, and redound to the credit of the designer. We
have before noticed the great ability exhibited by Mr. Darley
for the mode of illustration he adopts, which we may add is
that rendered famous by Retzsh. The series we are now noticing
are quite as meritorious as that designed by the same artist to
Rip Van Winkle; but the subject matter is not equally capable
of such broad contrasts in drollery as that legend presents.
Nevertheless, Mr. Darley has executed his task in the truest
appreciation of his author; and his hero is the veritable
Ichabod Crane of Irving; his love-making scene with “the
peerless daughter of Van Tassel” is exquisite in its quiet
humor; so also is the merry-making in the Dutch Farmer’s home.
Altogether, the series is extremely good, and does the greatest
credit to the designer. American literature thus illustrated by
American artists cannot fail to achieve honor to that country
in the old world as well as the new. We believe Mr. Darley, in
his line, to be as great as any American artist whose works
have fallen under our notice.”

Chaucer’s Monument.—The Athenæum says, “One of
the objections formerly urged against taking steps to restore
the perishing memorial of the Father of English Poetry in
Poet’s Corner was, that it was not really his tomb, but a
monument erected to do honor to his memory a century and a half
after his death. An examination, however, of the tomb itself,
by competent authorities, has proved this objection to be
unfounded—inasmuch as there can exist no doubt, we hear,
from the difference of workmanship, material, &c., that the
altar tomb is the original tomb of Geoffrey Chaucer,—and
that instead of Nicholas Brigham having erected an entirely new
monument, he only added to that which then existed the
overhanging canopy, &c. So that the sympathy of Chaucer’s
admirers is now invited to the restoration of what till now was
really not known to exist—the original tomb of the
Poet—as well as to the additions made to it by the
affectionate remembrance of Nicholas Brigham.”

Lessing’s new picture.—A letter from Düsseldorf under
date of 9th July, in the Courier and Enquirer, says that
Lessing’s great painting, “The Martyrdom of Huss,” Sad just
been finished and had been exhibited for the last few days at
the Academy of Fine Arts, where it was visited by thousands.
When it became known that orders for its immediate shipment had
arrived from New York, the desire to obtain a last view of this
truly great work became so intense that it was found necessary
to put the Police in requisition to keep back the throng, and
the gates of the Academy had to be closed. It causes general
regret that it is to be sent out of the country. The Cologne
Gazette calls this picture the most sublime production of
the great artist, and expresses the conviction that a speedy
fortune might be realized by its exhibition in Europe.

Mr. George Flagg has just completed a portrait of Mrs. E.
Oakes Smith, which will be ranked among the first productions
of his pencil. We know of scarce a picture as beautiful or a
portrait as truthful. It is to be engraved, we believe, by
Cheney.

Mlle. Rachel.—The wonderful accuracy of the
death-scene in “Adrienne Lecouvreur” has been the object of
universal praise in London, not merely from the thrilled and
thralled public, but from men of art and science. A physician,
it is said, was complimenting Mademoiselle on her amazing truth
to the symptoms of mortal agony: “You must have studied death
closely,” said he. “Yes, I have,” was the quiet reply; “my
maid’s. I went up to her—I stayed with her—she
recommended her mother to me!—I was studying my part.”
This is probably merely one of those cynical stories with which
the sharp people of Paris love to environ and encircle every
one who stands a dangerous chance of becoming too popular. But
smaller artists than Mademoiselle Rachel have sometimes had
recourse to curious expedients to give their dramatic
personations a show at reality. The French prima donna,
who not very long ago appeared in M. Clapisson’s poor opera,
“Jeanne la Folle,” is said to have shut herself up in the
Salpêtrière, by way of studying her part, and to
have been rewarded for her zealous curiosity by receiving a
basin of scalding soup dashed in her face by one of the poor
miserable objects of her examination.

A Frankfort journal states that the colossal statue of
Bavaria, by SCHWANTHALER, which is to be placed on the hill of
Seudling, surpasses in its gigantic proportions all the works
of the moderns. It will have to be removed in pieces from the
foundry where it is cast to its place of destination,—and
each piece will require sixteen horses to draw it. The great
toes are each half a metre in length. In the head two persons
could dance a polka very conveniently,—while the nose
might lodge the musician. The thickness of the robe—which
forms a rich drapery descending to the ankles—is about
six inches, and its circumference at the bottom about two
hundred metres. The Crown of Victory which the figure holds in
her hands weighs one hundred quintals (a quintal is a
hundred-weight).

The death of SIR ROBERT PEEL, says the Literary
Gazette, has awakened a busy competing spirit for the
production of articles relating to him, and especially in
connection with Literature and the Arta. In the one, Memoirs,
Speeches, Recollections, Anecdotes, &c., have been
abundantly supplied; and in the other, every printshop window
in London displays its Peels of every style and every degree,
but mostly very indifferent, absolutely bad, or utter
caricature.

Goupil, Vibert & Co. have published a series of
portraits of eminent Americans which is deserving of the
largest approval and sale. The head of Mr. Bryant is the best
ever published of that poet; it presents his fine features and
striking phrenology with great force and with pleasing as well
as just effect. A portrait of Mr. Willis is wonderfully
truthful, in detail, and is in an eminent degree
characteristic. The admirers of that author who have not seen
him will find in it their ideal, and all his acquaintances will
see in it as distinctly the real man who sits in the congress
of editors as the representative of the polite world. The head
of the artist Mount, after Elliott, is not by any means less
successful. Among the other portraits are those of Gen. Scott,
President Fillmore, Robert Fulton, J.Q. Adams, Mr. Clay, Mr.
Webster, and President Taylor. They are all on imperial sheets,
and are sold at $1 each.

The Paris papers tell a story of a young actor, who finding
no engagement in that city, came to America to try his fortune.
From New Orleans he went to California, was lucky as a digger,
embarked in business and got immensely rich. He is now building
in the Champs Elysées a magnificent hotel for his mother. All
actors are not so fortunate.

Expected arrivals from Nineveh.—The Great Bull, and
upward of one hundred tons of sculpture, excavated by Dr.
Layard, are now on their way to England, and may be expected in
the course of September. In addition-to the Elgin, Phigalian,
Lycian, and Boodroun marbles, the British Museum will soon be
enriched with a magnificent series of Assyrian sculptures.

Mr. Burt has nearly finished the “Anne Page and Slender” of
Leslie, which is to be the annual engraving of the Art Union.
It will be an admirable picture, but we cannot but regret that
the managers selected for this purpose a work so familiar.

The French Minister of the Interior has decided that marble
busts of M. Gay-Lussac and of M. Blainville shall be executed
at the expense of the government, and placed in the
Institute.

Mr. Powell, who is living in Paris, engaged upon his picture
for the capital, has been in ill health nearly all the
summer.

Recent Deaths.

The French papers report the death, at Paris, of M. MORA,
the Mexican Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of St. James.
M. Mora was the author of a History of Mexico and its
Revolutions since the establishment of its independence, and
editor-in-chief of several journals in Mexico.

MR. B. SIMMONS, an amiable and accomplished writer, whose
name will be recollected as that of a frequent contributor of
lyrical poems of a high order to Blackwood’s Magazine,
and to several of the Annuals, died in London on the 20th of
July.

[From Graham’s Magazine.]

ON A PORTRAIT OF CROMWELL.

BY JAMES T. FIELD.

[From the Examiner.]

WORDSWORTH’S POSTHUMOUS POEM.³

This is a voice that speaks to us across a gulf of nearly
fifty years. A few months ago Wordsworth was taken from us at
the ripe age of fourscore, yet here we have him addressing the
public, as for the first time, with all the fervor, the unworn
freshness, the hopeful confidence of thirty. We are carried
back to the period when Coleridge, Byron, Scott, Rogers, and
Moore were in their youthful prime. We live again in the
stirring days when the poets who divided public attention and
interest with the Fabian struggle in Portugal and Spain, with
the wild and terrible events of the Russian campaign, with the
uprising of the Teutonic nations and the overthrow of Napoleon,
were in a manner but commencing their cycle of songs. This is
to renew, to antedate, the youth of a majority of the living
generation. But only those whose memory still carries them so
far back, can feel within them any reflex of that eager
excitement with which the news of battles fought and won, or
mailcoach copies of some new work of Scott, or Byron, or the
Edinburgh Review, were looked for and received in those
already old days.

We need not remind the readers of the Excursion that
when Wordsworth was enabled by the generous enthusiasm of
Raisley Calvert to retire with a slender independence to his
native mountains, there to devote himself exclusively to his
art, his first step was to review and record in verse the
origin and progress of his own powers, as far as he was
acquainted with them. This was at once an exercise in
versification, and a test for the kind of poetry for which he
was by temperament fitted. The result was a determination to
compose a philosophical poem containing views of man, of
nature, and of society. This, ambitious conception has been
doomed to share the fate of so many other colossal
undertakings. Of the three parts of his Recluse, thus
planned, only the second, (the Excursion, published in
1814,) has been completed. Of the other two there exists only
the first book of the first, and the plan of the third. The
Recluse will remain in fragmentary greatness, a poetical
Cathedral of Cologne.

Matters standing thus, it has not been without a melancholy
sense of the uncertainty of human projects, and of the contrast
between the sanguine enterprise and its silent evaporation (so
often the “history of an individual mind”), that we have
perused this Prelude which no completed strain was
destined to follow. Yet in the poem itself there is nothing to
inspire depression. It is animated throughout with the hopeful
confidence in the poet’s own powers, so natural to the time of
life at which it was composed; it evinces a power and soar of
imagination unsurpassed in any of his writings; and its images
and incidents have a freshness and distinctness which they not
seldom lost, when they came to be elaborated, as many of them
were, in his minor poems of a later date.

The Prelude, as the title-page indicates, is a
poetical autobiography, commencing with the earliest
reminiscences of the author, and continued to the time at which
it was composed. We are told that it was begun in 1799 and
completed, in 1805. It consists of fourteen books. Two are
devoted to the infancy and school-time of the poet; four to the
period of his University life; two to a brief residence in
London immediately subsequent to his leaving Cambridge, and a
retrospect of the progress his mind had then made; and three to
a residence in France, chiefly in the Loire, but partly in
Paris, during the stormy period of Louis the Sixteenth’s flight
and capture, and the fierce contest between the Girondins and
Robespierre. Five books are then occupied with an analysis of
the internal struggle occasioned by the contradictory
influences of rural and secluded nature in boyhood, and of
society when the young man first mingles with the world. The
surcease of the strife is recorded in the fourteenth book,
entitled “Conclusion.”

The poem is addressed to Coleridge; and apart from its
poetical merits, is interesting as at once a counterpart and a
supplement to that author’s philosophical and beautiful
criticism of the Lyrical Ballads in his Biographia
Literaria. It completes the explanation, there given, of
the peculiar constitution of Wordsworth’s mind, and of his
poetical theory. It confirms and justifies our opinion that
that theory was essentially partial and erroneous; but at the
same time it establishes the fact that Wordsworth was a true
and a great poet in despite of his theory.

The great defect of Wordsworth, in our judgment, was want of
sympathy with and knowledge of men. From his birth till his
entry at college, he lived in a region where he met with none
whose minds might awaken his sympathies, and where life was
[pg 272] altogether uneventful. On
the other hand, that region abounded with the inert,
striking, and most impressive objects of natural scenery.
The elementary grandeur and beauty of external nature came
thus to fill up his mind to the exclusion of human
interests. To such a result his individual constitution
powerfully contributed. The sensuous element was singularly
deficient in his nature. He never seems to have passed
through that erotic period out of which some poets have
never emerged. A soaring, speculative imagination, and an
impetuous, resistless self-will, were his distinguishing
characteristics. From first to last he concentrated himself
within himself; brooding over his own fancies and
imaginations to the comparative disregard of the incidents
and impressions which suggested them; and was little
susceptible of ideas originating in other minds. We behold
the result. He lives alone in a world of mountains, streams,
and atmospheric phenomena, dealing with moral abstractions,
and rarely encountered by even shadowy specters of beings
outwardly resembling himself. There is measureless grandeur
and power in his moral speculations. There is intense
reality in his pictures of external nature. But though his
human characters are presented with great skill of
metaphysical analysis, they have rarely life or animation.
He is always the prominent, often the exclusive, object of
his own song.

Upon a mind so constituted, with its psychological
peculiarities so cherished and confirmed, the fortunes and
fates of others, and the stirring events of his time, made
vivid but very transient impressions. The conversation and
writing of contemporaries trained among books, and with the
faculty of speech more fully developed than that of thought,
seemed colorless and empty to one with—whom natural
objects and grandeurs were always present in such overpowering
force. Excluded by his social position from taking an active
part in the public events of the day, and repelled by the
emptiness of the then fashionable literature, he turned to
private and humble life as possessing at least a reality. But
he thus withheld himself from the contemplation of those great
mental excitements which only great public struggles can
awaken. He contracted a habit of exaggerating the importance of
every-day incidents and emotions. He accustomed himself to see
in men and in social relations only what he was predetermined
to see there, and to impute to them a value and importance
derived mainly from his own self-will. Even his natural good
taste contributed to confirm him in his error. The two
prevailing schools of literature in England, at that time, were
the trashy and mouthing writers who adopted the sounding
language of Johnson and Darwin, unenlivened by the vigorous
thought of either; and the “dead-sea apes” of that inflated,
sentimental, revolutionary style which Diderot had
unconsciously originated, and Kotzebue carried beyond the verge
of caricature. The right feeling and manly thought of
Wordsworth were disgusted by these shallow word-mongers, and he
flew to the other extreme. Under the influences—repulsive
and attractive—we have thus attempted to indicate, he
adopted the theory that as much of grandeur and profound
emotion was to be found in mere domestic incidents and
feelings, as on the more conspicuous stage of public life; and
that a bald and naked simplicity of language was the perfection
of style. Singularly enough, he was confirmed in these notions
by the very writer of the day whose own natural genius, more
than any of his contemporaries, impelled him to revel in great,
wild, supernatural conceptions; and to give utterance to them
in gorgeous language. Coleridge was perhaps the only
contemporary from whom Wordsworth ever took an opinion; and
that he did so from him, is mainly attributable to the fact
that Coleridge did little more than reproduce to him his own
notions, sometimes rectified by a subtler logic, but always
rendered more attractive by new and dazzling illustrations.

Fortunately it is out of the power of the most perverse
theory to spoil the true poet. The poems of Wordsworth must
continue to charm and elevate mankind, in defiance of his
crotchets, just as Luther, Henri Quatre, and other living
impersonations of poetry do, despite all quaint peculiarities
of the attire, the customs, or the opinions of their respective
ages, with which they were imbued. The spirit of truth and
poetry redeems, ennobles, hallows, every external form in which
it may be lodged. We may “pshaw” and “pooh” at Harry Gill and
the Idiot Boy; but the deep and tremulous tenderness of
sentiment, the strong-winged flight of fancy, the excelling and
unvarying purity, which pervade all the writings of Wordsworth,
and the exquisite melody of his lyrical poems, must ever
continue to attract and purify the mind. The very excesses into
which his one-sided theory betrayed him, acted as a useful
counter-agent to the prevailing bad taste of his time.

The Prelude may take a permanent place as one of the most
perfect of his compositions. It has much of the fearless
felicity of youth; and its imagery has the sharp and vivid
outline of ideas fresh from the brain. The subject—the
development of his own great powers—raises him above that
willful dallying with trivialties which repels us in some of
his other works. And there is real vitality in the theme, both
from our anxiety to know the course of such a mind, and from
the effect of an absorbing interest in himself excluding that
languor which sometimes seized him in his efforts to impart or
attribute interest to themes possessing little or none in
themselves. Its mere narrative, though often very homely, and
dealing in too many words, is often characterized also by
elevated imagination, and always by eloquence. The bustle of
London life, the prosaic uncouthness of its exterior, the
earnest heart that beats beneath it, the
[pg 273] details even of its
commonest amusements, from Bartholomew Fair to Sadler’s
Wells, are portrayed with simple force and delicate
discrimination; and for the most part skillfully contrasted
with the rural life of the poet’s native home. There are
some truthful and powerful sketches of French character and
life, in the early revolutionary era. But above all, as
might have been anticipated, Wordsworth’s heart revels in
the elementary beauty and grandeur of his mountain theme;
while his own simple history is traced with minute fidelity,
and is full of unflagging interest.

We have already adverted to the fact that this Prelude was
but the overture to a grander song which the poet has left, in
a great measure, unsung. Reverting to this consideration an
important fact seems to force itself upon our notice. The
creative power of Wordsworth would appear to have been
paralyzed after the publication of his Excursion. All his most
finished works precede that period. His later writings
generally lack the strength and freshness which we find in
those of an earlier date. Some may attribute this to his want
of the stimulus which the necessity of writing for a livelihood
imparts, and in part they may be right; but this is not the
whole secret. That his isolation from the stirring contact of
competition, that his utter disregard of contemporary events,
allowed his mind, which for perfect health’s sake requires
constantly-renewed impulses from without, to subside into
comparative hebetude, there can be no doubt whatever. But the
main secret of the freezing up of his fountain of poetical
inspiration, we really take to have been his change of
politics. Wordsworth’s muse was essentially liberal—one
may say, Jacobinical. That he was unconscious of any sordid
motive for his change, we sincerely believe; but as certainly
his conforming was the result less of reasonable conviction
than of willfulness. It was by a determined effort of his will
that he brought himself, to believe in the Church-and-State
notions which he latterly promulgated. Hence the want of
definite views, and of a living interest, which characterizes
all his writings subsequent to that change, when compared with
those of an earlier time. It was Wordsworth’s wayward fate to
be patronized and puffed into notice by the champions of old
abuses, by the advocates of the pedantry of Oxford, and by the
maintainers of the despotism not even of Pitt but of
Castlereagh. It is already felt, however, that the poet whom
these men were mainly instrumental in bringing into notice,
will live in men’s memories by exactly those of his writings
most powerful to undermine and overthrow their dull and faded
bigotries. Despite his own efforts, Wordsworth (as has been
said of Napoleon) is the child and champion of Jacobinism.
Though clothed in ecclesiastical formulas, his religion is
little more than the simple worship of nature; his noblest
moral flights are struggles to emancipate himself from
conventional usage; and the strong ground of his thoughts, as
of his style, is nature stripped of the gauds with which the
pupils of courts and circles would bedeck and be-ribbon it.
Even in the ranks of our opponents Wordsworth has been laboring
in our behalf.

It is in the record of his extra-academic life that the poet
soars his freest flight, in passages where we have a very echo
of the emotions of an emancipated worshiper of nature flying
back to his loved resorts. Apart from its poetic value, the
book is a graphical and interesting portraiture of the
struggles of an ingenuous and impetuous mind to arrive at a
clear insight into its own interior constitution and external
relations, and to secure the composure of self-knowledge and of
equally adjusted aspirations. As a poem it is likely to lay
fast and enduring hold on pure and aspiring intellects, and to
strengthen the claim of Wordsworth to endure with his land’s
language.

THE MONUMENT TO SIR ROBERT PEEL.

A LETTER FROM WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR,

TO THE EDITOR OF THE ‘EXAMINER.’

Now the fever hath somewhat subsided which came over the
people from the grave of Sir Robert Peel, there is room for a
few observations on his decease and on its consequences. All
public writers, I believe, have expatiated on his character,
comparing him with others who, within our times, have occupied
the same position. My own opinion has invariably been that he
was the wisest of all our statesmen; and certainly, though he
found reason to change his sentiments and his measures, he
changed them honestly, well weighed, always from conviction,
and always for the better. He has been compared, and seemingly
in no spirit of hostility or derision, with a Castlereagh, a
Perceval, an Addington. a Canning. Only one of these is worthy
of notice, namely Canning, whose brilliancy made his
shallowness less visible, and whose graces, of style and
elocution threw a vail over his unsoundness and lubricity. Sir
Robert Peel was no satirist or epigrammatist: he was only a
statesman in public life: only a virtuous and friendly man in
private. Par negotiis, nee supra. Walpole alone
possessed his talents for business. But neither Peel nor his
family was enriched from the spoils of his country; Walpole
spent in building and pictures more than double the value of
his hereditary estate, and left the quadruple to his
descendants.

Dissimilar from Walpole, and from commoner and coarser men
who occupied the same office, Peel forbade that a name which he
had made illustrious should be degraded and stigmatized by any
title of nobility. For he knew that all those titles had their
origin and nomenclature from military services, and belong to
military men, like their epaulets and spurs and chargers. They
sound well enough against the sword and helmet, but strangely
in law-courts and cathedrals: but, reformer as he
[pg 274] was, he could not reform
all this; he could only keep clear of it in his own
person.

I now come to the main object of my letter.

Subscriptions are advertised for the purpose of raising
monuments to Sir Robert Peel; and a motion has been made in
Parliament for one in Westminster Abbey at the public expense,
Whatever may be the precedents, surely the house of God should
contain no object but such as may remind us of His presence and
our duty to Him. Long ago I proposed that ranges of statues and
busts should commemorate the great worthies of our country. All
the lower part of our National Gallery might be laid open for
this purpose. Even the best monuments in Westminster Abbey and
St. Paul’s are deformities to the edifice. Let us not continue
this disgrace. Deficient as we are in architects, we have many
good statuaries, and we might well employ them on the statues
of illustrious commanders, and the busts of illustrious
statesmen and writers. Meanwhile our cities, and especially the
commercial, would, I am convinced, act more wisely, and more
satisfactorily to the relict of the deceased, if, instead of
statues, they erected schools and almshouses, with an
inscription to his memory.

We glory in about sixty whose busts and statues may occupy
what are now the “deep solitudes and awful cells” in our
national gallery. Our literary men of eminence are happily more
numerous than the political or the warlike, or both together.
There is only one class of them which might be advantageously
excluded, namely, the theological; and my reasons are these.
First, their great talents were chiefly employed on
controversy; secondly, and consequently, their images would
excite dogmatical discord. Every sect of the Anglican Church,
and every class of dissenters, complaining of undue
preferences. Painture and sculpture lived in the midst of
corruption, lived throughout it, and seemed indeed to draw
vitality from it, as flowers the most delicate from noxious
air; but they collapsed at the searching breath of free
inquiry, and could not abide persecution. The torch of
Philosophy never kindled the suffocating fagot, under whose
smoke Theology was mistaken for Religion. Theology had, until
now, been speculative and quiescent: she abandoned to
Philosophy these humbler qualities: instead of allaying and
dissipating, as Philosophy had always done, she excited and she
directed animosities. Oriental in her parentage, and keeping up
her wide connections in that country, she acquired there all
the artifices most necessary to the furtherance of her designs:
among the rest was ventriloquism, which she quite perfected,
making her words seem to sound from above and from below and
from every side around. Ultimately, when men had fallen on
their faces at this miracle, she assumed the supreme power.
Kings were her lackeys, and nations the dust under her
palfrey’s hoof. By her sentence Truth was gagged, scourged,
branded, cast down on the earth in manacles; and Fortitude, who
had stood at Truth’s side, was fastened with nails and pulleys
to the stake. I would not revive by any images, in the abode of
the graceful and the gentle Arts, these sorrowful
reminiscences. The vicissitudes of the world appear to be
bringing round again the spectral Past. Let us place great men
between it and ourselves: they all are tutelar: not the warrior
and the statesman only; not only the philosopher; but also the
historian who follows them step by step, and the poet who
secures us from peril and dejection by his counter-charm.
Philosophers in most places are unwelcome: but there is no
better reason why Shaftesbury and Hobbes should be excluded
from our gallery, than why Epicurus should have been from
Cicero’s or Zeno from Lucullus’s. Of our sovereigns, I think
Alfred, Cromwell, and William III alone are eligible; and they,
because they opposed successfully the subverters of the laws.
Three viceroys of Ireland will deservedly be placed in the same
receptacle; Sir John Perrot, Lord Chesterfield, and (in due
time) the last Lord-Deputy. One Speaker, one only, of the
Parliament; he without whom no Parliament would be now
existing; he who declared to Henry IV. that until all public
grievances were removed, no subsidy should be granted. The name
of this Speaker may be found in Rapin; English historians talk
about facts, forgetting men.

Admirals and generals are numerous and conspicuous. Drake,
Blake, Rodney, Jervis, Nelson, Collingwood; the subduer of
Algiers beaten down for the French to occupy: and the defender
of Acre, the first who defeated, discomfited, routed, broke,
and threw into shameful flight, Bonaparte. Our generals are
Marlborough, Peterborough, Wellington, and that successor to
his fame in India, who established the empire that was falling
from us, who achieved in a few days two arduous victories, who
never failed in any enterprise, who accomplished the most
difficult with the smallest expenditure of blood, who corrected
the disorders of the military, who gave the soldier an example
of temperance, the civilian of simplicity and frugality, and
whose sole (but exceedingly great) reward, was the approbation
of our greatest man.

With these come the statesmen of the Commonwealth, the
students of Bacon, the readers of Philip Sidney, the companions
of Algernon, the precursors of Locke and Newton. Opposite to
them are Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton; lower in
dignity, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Scott, Burns,
Shelley, Southey, Byron, Wordsworth; the author of
Hohenlinden and the Battle of the Baltic; and the
glorious woman who equaled these, two animated works in her
Ivan and Casabianca. Historians have but recently
risen up among us: and long be it before, by command of
Parliament, the chisel grates on the brow of a Napier, a Grote,
and Macaulay!

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.

[From the Spectator.]

JURISPRUDENCE OF THE MOGULS: THE PANDECTS OF
AURUNGZEBE.⁴

THE Government of British India have not neglected to
countenance the study of the indigenous and other systems of
law which they found established on acquiring possession of the
country. Warren Hastings was the first to recognize the value
of such knowledge; and to his encouragement, if not to his
incitement, we are indebted for the compilation of Hindoo law
translated by Halbed, Jones, Colebrooke, Macnaghten, Hamilton,
and a pretty numerous body of accomplished men, of whom Mr.
Baillie is the most recently enrolled laborer in the vineyard,
have carried on the good work. More comprehensive and accurate
views of Hindoo law have gradually been developed, and the more
advanced and more influential system of Mahometan jurisprudence
has also shared in the attention of European students. There
is, however, still much to be done in this field of inquiry; as
a few remarks on the nature of the present publication, and the
source whence its materials are derived, will show.

The law of Mahometan jurists is for India pretty much what
the Roman law is for Scotland and the Continental nations of
Europe. Savigny has shown how, throughout all the territories
formerly included within the limits of the Roman Empire, a
large amount of Roman legal doctrines and forms of procedure
continued to be operative after the Empire’s subversion. The
revival of the study of the Roman law, as embodied in the
compilations of Justinian, by the doctors of the school of
Bologna, augmented and systematized these remnants of Roman
jurisprudence, and extended their application to countries
which (like great part of Germany) had never been subjected to
the sway of Rome. In like manner, throughout that part of India
which was permanently subdued and organized by the Mogul
dynasty, and also those parts in which minor Islamitic states
were established, the organization of the courts of justice,
and the legal opinions of the individuals who officiated in
them, necessarily introduced a large amount of Mahometan
jurisprudence. This element of the law of India was augmented
and systematized by the writings of private jurists, and by
compilations undertaken by command of princes. As with the
Roman jurisprudence in Europe, so with Mahometan jurisprudence
in India, only so much of its doctrines and forms could at any
time be considered to possess legal force as had been reenacted
by the local sovereigns, or introduced by judges in the form of
decisions. A systematic knowledge of the whole body of
Mahometan law was important to the Indian lawyer, as enabling
him more thoroughly to understand the system, and its various
isolated doctrines; but the whole body of that law was at no
time binding in India. Since the establishment of British sway,
only so much of the Mahometan law as has kept its ground in the
practice of the courts, or has been reenacted by the
“regulations” or “ordinances” of the Anglo-Indian Government,
is law; the rest is only valuable as the “antiquities of
the law,” which help to trace the origin of what survives, and
thereby throw light upon what in it is obscure or doubtful.

Among the most valuable, if not indeed the most valuable of
the compilations from which we may obtain a knowledge of
Mahometan jurisprudence, is the “Futawa Alumgeeree,” mentioned
in Mr. Baillie’s title-page. Its value is not confined to the
purposes of those who would make themselves acquainted with
Mahometan jurisprudence in the peculiar form it assumed in
India. It is highly esteemed throughout Islam, and is quoted
even by the doctors of Mecca as the Futawa-i-hind, or the
Indian responsa prudentum. It was compiled by the orders
of the Emperor Aurungzebe. It is a digest of the “Futawa” of
the most celebrated jurists of the Hanifeh (or, as Mr. Baillie
spells it, Hunefeeah) sect or school. Mr. Baillie
informs us in his preface, that “futawa is the plural
form of futwa, a term in common use in Mahometan
countries to signify an exposition of law by a public officer
called the mooftee, or a case submitted to him by the
kazee or judge.” The “futwa,” therefore, seems to
correspond not so much with our English “decisions” or
“precedents” as with the “responsa prudentum,” that fertile
source of doctrines in the Roman law. The “Futawa Alumgeeree”
consequently resembles the Pandects of Justinian in being a
systematical arrangement of selections from juridical
authorities—compiled by Imperial authority; but differs
from it in this, that the selections are made exclusively from
the “responsa prudentum,” and a few legal treatises, whereas
Justinian’s digest combined with those excerpts from judicial
decisions, prætorian edicts, &c. With this distinction, we
may regard the “Futawa Alumgeeree” as the Pandects or Digest of
Mahometan Law. As in the Roman work of that name, to each
extract is appended the name of the original work from which it
is taken; and the whole of them are so arranged as to form a
complete digest of Mahometan law.

A work of this kind is invaluable to the student who would
make himself master of Mahometan jurisprudence as a system. But
great care must be taken not to misapprehend the exact nature
of the knowledge to be obtained from it. The “Futawa
Alumgeeree” is a systematic exposition of the principles of
Mahometan law; it assuredly does not enable us to ascertain
what doctrines of that law are
[pg 276] now of legal force in
India, or even what doctrines have at any time had force in
India. It does not appear to have been Aurungzebe’s
intention to promulgate it as a code, but to present it to
lawyers as a complete text-book. Even if he did by ordinance
attribute to it the power of law, such ordinance was only
effectual at any time in the provinces of the Mogul Empire;
and since the disruption of that empire, it has been
superseded and modified by laws and the practice of
law-courts in the various independent states erected on its
ruins.

Again the general scholar must be on his guard against the
delusion that he will find in this digest materials
illustrative of the social condition of India under the Mogul
dynasty. The juridical works excerpted in it are almost all
foreign to Hindostan; the special cases illustrative of
abstract doctrines are taken from other countries, and many of
them from ages antecedent to the invasion of India by the
Moguls.

Though Persian was the court language of the Mogul dynasty,
there is scarcely any Persian element in Aurungzebe’s legal
compilation. The Shiite views of jurisprudence, as of theology,
prevailed in Persia; the “Futawa Alumgeeree” is strictly
Sunnite. It is not difficult to account for this.—The
Mahometan conquerors of India were mainly of Turkish or Tartar
race; they came from Turan, a region which from time immemorial
has stood in antagonistic relations to Iran or Persia. This may
account for the fact that the races of Turan which have
embraced Mahometanism have uniformly adhered to the Sunnite
sect—the sect most hostile to the Persian Shias—not
only when they settled in the countries where the Sunnite sect
originated, but when they remained in their native regions. The
views of the Sunnites were first promulgated and have prevailed
most extensively in those regions of Islam which were once part
of the Roman empire, which nominally at least was Christian;
those of the Shiites, in the countries where, under the
Sassanides and Arsacidæ, the doctrines of Zoroaster
predominated. The Euphrates forms pretty nearly the line of
demarkation between them.

The Caliphs dominated over both countries and over both
sects. Under their orthodox protection the Sunnite doctrines
were able to strike root in Balkh and Samarkand—the
ancient Turan, and therefore hostile to Iran and Persia. When
Islam was reorganized after the anarchy which ensued upon the
overthrow of the Caliphs, Persia became the appanage of the
Sophis or Shiite dynasty; the regions to the West of the
Euphrates—the ci-devant Roman Empire—acknowledged
the rule of the Turkish dynasties, which were Sunnite. On the
Oxus and further East—the old Turan—the Sunnite
sect was sufficiently strong to defy the efforts of the Shiite
sovereigns of Persia to eradicate it. The doctors of Samarkand
and Bokhara continued (and continue) as orthodox Sunnites as
those of Kufah, Mecca, and Stamboul.

Accordingly, we find the authorities excerpted in the
“Futawa Alumgeeree” consist almost exclusively of two classes;
they are either the immediate disciples of Hanifa at Kufah and
Bagdad, or the jurists of Samarkand and Bokhara. The law-cases
they expounded are such as had originated, or might have
originated, in those countries—in Babylonia or Turan. And
they are for the most part taken from a state of society, and
illustrative of social relations, which prevailed in these
countries at a period long antecedent to that of Aurunzebe. To
attempt to illustrate the civil and social condition of India,
under that Emperor by their aid, would be as preposterous as to
attempt to illustrate the civil and social condition of those
parts of Germany where the Roman law still possesses authority
from cases recorded in the Pandects of Justinian.

The real use and value of the “Futawa Alumgeeree” may be
briefly explained. In every country in Europe where the Roman
law is still recognized as more or less authoritative—and
indeed in every country where the common law has borrowed more
or less from the Roman—an acquaintance with the system of
Roman jurisprudence as it is embodied in the law-books of
Justinian has its value for the scientific lawyer. In like
manner a knowledge of Mahometan jurisprudence as embodied in
the “Futawa Alumgeeree” cannot fail to be instructive for the
lawyers of all the countries of Islam, and the lawyers of
India, where so much of the existing practical law has been
derived from that source. To the general scholar who wishes to
master the civil history of Arabia and Babylonia, in which the
Sunnite sect, and more particularly the Hanifite subdivision of
it, originated, or to familiarize himself with the moral
theories which regulate the judgments and actions of the modern
Turks, Turcomans, Arabians, and Egyptians, the digest of
Aurungzeebee is also a valuable repertory of facts and
illustrations.

For this reason we incline to be of opinion that Mr. Baillie
is mistaken in thinking that a selection from the two books of
the “Futawa Alumgeeree,” which embrace the subject of “sale”
can have much utility for Indian practitioners. It does not
follow, because a legal doctrine is declared sound in this
work, that it is or ever has been practically applicable in
India. As an authoritative declaration of legal doctrines, the
book is as likely to mislead as to guide aright. On the other
hand, as an exposition of the general principles of Mahometan
law, even with regard to sale, it is necessarily imperfect. The
work from which it is taken is a collection of legal opinions,
which had in their day the force of judicial decisions—of
something equivalent to the “responsa prudentum” of Roman
jurisprudence. Each is expounded on its own merits; and all the
special doctrines involved
[pg 277] in it are laid down. Hence
it comes, that much that is calculated to throw light on the
principles of the law of sale must be sought under other
heads; and that much included in the chapters ostensibly
treating of sale refers to other topics. As part of an
entire digest of the law compiled on the same principle as
that of Justinian, the two books relating to sale are
sufficient; but for an isolated treatise on “sale,” they
contain at once too much and too little.

Nevertheless, we welcome Mr. Baillie’s publication as a
valuable addition to juridical and even to general literature.
The translation, though not by any means free from defects, is
the best specimen of a really good Mahometan law-book that has
yet been published. The defects to which we allude are twofold.
In the first place, though Mr. Baillie mentions that in the
original the name of the treatise from which it is taken is
appended to every excerpt, he has not in his translation given
those references. His work is not therefore what the original
is, a Chrestomathia of the best Arabian jurists—a
succedaneum for their complete works—an illustration of
Arabic legal literature. Again, he is often loose and
vacillating in the use of the English words he has selected as
corresponding to the technical phraseology of the Arabian
jurists, and sometimes infelicitous in the selection of his
English terms. It has occurred to us that he would have
succeeded better in rendering the exact meaning of his
originals, had he availed himself more of technical phrases of
the Roman law which are familiar to all European jurists. Is
does not occur to us that he would by doing so have been in
danger of Romanizing the Mahometan to an extent that might
mislead. Mill, in his History of British India, has noticed how
closely the classification of the Mahometan approaches to that
of the Roman jurists. An attentive perusal of Mr. Baillie’s
volume has convinced us that the analogy in the substance is
quite as strong as in the arrangements. This fact seems
susceptible of being accounted for on historical grounds.
Mahometanism is in fact a sect or heresy of Christianity. The
views and sentiments, the aggregate of which make up the body
of Christian opinion, are not all of Jewish or Christian
origin. They are the moral creed of societies whose opinions
and civilization have been derived in part from other sources.
The philosophy of Greece and the law of Rome have contributed
in nearly equal proportions to the theosophy of the Hebrews.
The jurisprudence of all Christian nations is mainly referable
to Rome for its origin, and the same is the case with at least
the Sunnite Mahometans. The nations of Islam took only their
religious creed from their Prophet; the jurists of Kufah
retained and expounded the civil law which prevailed among them
before his time. That law was the law of the Greek Empire,
developed in the same way as that of the Western Empire under
the judicial and legislative auspices of Roman Prætors and
Pro-Consuls, aided by Roman jurists. Theophilus, one of the
jurists employed by Justinian for his compilations, lectured in
Greek on the Institutions; and the substance of his lectures
still survives under the name of the Paraphrase of Theophilus.
The Greek edicts and novels of Justinian’s successors are
mainly Roman law. Throughout the Byzantine Empire (within which
Kufah and the region where Bagdad now stands were included)
Roman law was paramount, and Roman jurists were numerous. The
arrangement, the subdivisions, and the substance of Mahometan
jurisprudence, show that it has been principally derived from
this source. Some of its doctrines are doubtless aboriginal
engrafted on the law of the Empire; and it has been modified in
some respects to reconcile it to the religious dictates of
Islam, just as the law of Pagan Rome was modified after
Christianity became the religion of the Empire. But still
Mahometan jurisprudence retains undeniably the lineaments of
its parentage.

This consideration places in a strong light the importance
of the study of Mahometan law. The increasing intimacy of our
relations with independent Mahometan states makes it of the
utmost consequence that we should entertain correct views of
their opinions and institutions; and no better key to the
knowledge of both can be found than in the historical study of
their law. Again, we are called upon to legislate and supply
judges for British India, a large proportion of the inhabitants
of which are Mahometans. Even the Hindoos of the former Mogul
Empire have adopted many legal forms and doctrines from their
conquerors. A minute and accurate acquaintance with Mahometan
jurisprudence is an indispensable preliminary to judicious
legislation for British India. For these reasons, it could be
wished that Mr. Baillie, or some other equally accomplished
laborer in that field, would set himself to do for the “Futawa
Alumgeeree” what Heineccius and other modern civilians have
done for the law-books of Justinian—present the European
public with an elegant and exact abstract of its contents.

The following, from Southey’s “Gridiron,” now first
published in his Memoirs, ought to be set to music for the
Beef-Steak Club:—

The most ignorant of the world’s fools are those called
“knowing ones,” a phrase satirical with the very glee of
irony.

THE MYSTERIOUS COMPACT.

A FREE TRANSLATION FROM THE GERMAN.

PART II—CONCLUSION

(Concluded from page 192.)

Several weeks passed away. Edward spared no pains to
discover some trace of the lady in question, but all in vain.
No one in the neighborhood knew the family; and he had already
determined, as soon as the spring began, to ask for leave of
absence, and to travel through the country where Ferdinand had
formed his unfortunate attachment, when a circumstance occurred
which coincided strangely with his wishes. His
commanding-officer gave him a commission to purchase some
horses, which, to his great consolation, led him exactly into
that part of the country where Ferdinand had been quartered. It
was a market-town of some importance. He was to remain there
some time, which suited his plans exactly; and he made use of
every leisure hour to cultivate the acquaintance of the
officers, to inquire into Ferdinand’s connections and
acquaintance, to trace the mysterious name if possible, and
thus fulfill a sacred duty. For to him it appeared a sacred
duty to execute the commission of his departed friend—to
get possession of the ring, and to be the means, as he hoped,
of giving rest to the troubled spirit of Ferdinand.

Already, on the evening of the second day, he was sitting in
the coffee-room with burghers of the place and officers of
different regiments.

A newly-arrived cornet was inquiring whether the
neighborhood were a pleasant one, of an infantry officer, one
of Hallberg’s corps. “For,” said he, “I come from charming
quarters.”

“There is not much to boast of,” replied the captain. “There
is no good fellowship, no harmony among the people.”

“I will tell you why that is,” cried an animated lieutenant;
“that is because there is no house as a point of reunion, where
one is sure to find and make acquaintances, and to be amused,
and where each individual ascertains his own merits by the
effect they produce on society at large.”

“Yes, we have had nothing of that kind since the Varniers
left us,” said the captain.

“Varniers!” cried Edward, with an eagerness he could ill
conceal. “The name sounds foreign.”

“They were not Germans—they were emigrants from the
Netherlands, who had left their country on account of political
troubles,” replied the captain.

“Ah, that was a charming house,” cried the lieutenant,
“cultivation, refinement, a sufficient competency, the whole
style of establishment free from ostentation, yet most
comfortable; and Emily—Emily was the soul of the whole
house.”

“Emily Varnier!” echoed Edward, while his heart beat fast
and loud.

“Yes, yes! that was the name of the prettiest, most
graceful, most amiable girl in the world,” said the
lieutenant.

“You seem bewitched by the fair Emily,” observed the
cornet.

“I think you would have been too, had you known her,”
rejoined the lieutenant; “she was the jewel of the whole
society. Since she went away there is no bearing their stupid
balls and assemblies.”

“But you must not forget,” the captain resumed once more,
“when you attribute everything to the charms of the fair girl,
that not only she but the whole family has disappeared, and we
have lost that house which formed, as you say, so charming a
point of reunion in our neighborhood.”

“Yes, yes; exactly so,” said an old gentleman, a civilian,
who had been silent hitherto; “the Varniers’ house is a great
loss in the country, where such losses are not so easily
replaced as in a large town. First, the father died, then came
the cousin and carried the daughter away.”

“And did this cousin marry the young lady?” inquired Edward,
in a tone tremulous with agitation.

“Certainly,” answered the old gentleman; “it was a very
great match for her; he bought land to the value of half a
million about here.”

“And he was an agreeable, handsome man, we must all allow,”
remarked the captain.

“But she would never have married him,” exclaimed the
lieutenant, “if poor Hallberg had not died.”

Edward was breathless, but he did not speak a word.

“She would have been compelled to do so in any case,” said
the old man; “the father had destined them for each other from
infancy, and people say he made his daughter take a vow as he
lay on his death-bed.”

“That sounds terrible,” said Edward; “and does not speak
much for the good feeling of the cousin.”

“She could not have fulfilled her father’s wish,” interposed
the lieutenant; “her heart was bound up in Hallberg, and
Hallberg’s in her. Few people, perhaps, know this, for the
lovers were prudent and discreet; I, however, knew it all.”

“And why was she not allowed to follow the inclination of
her heart?” asked Edward.

“Because her father had promised her,” replied the captain:
“you used just now the word terrible; it is a fitting
expression, according to my version of the matter. It appears
that one of the branches of the house of Varnier had committed
an act of injustice toward another, and Emily’s father
considered it a point of conscience to make reparation. Only
through the marriage of his daughter with a member of the
ill-used branch could that act be obliterated and made up for,
and, therefore, he pressed the matter sorely.”

“Yes, and the headlong passion which Emily inspired her
cousin with abetted his
designs.”

“Then her cousin loved Emily?” inquired Edward.

“Oh, to desperation,” was the reply. “He was a rival to her
shadow, who followed her not more closely than he did. He was
jealous of the rose that she placed on her bosom.”

“Then poor Emily is not likely to have a calm life with such
a man,” said Edward.

“Come,” interposed the old gentleman, with en authoritative
tone, “I think you, gentlemen, go a little too far. I know
D’Effernay; he is an honest, talented man, very rich, indeed,
and generous; he anticipates his wife in every wish. She has
the most brilliant house in the neighborhood, and lives like a
princess.”

“And trembles,” insisted the lieutenant, “when she hears her
husband’s footstep. What good can riches be to her? She would
have been happier with Hallberg.”

“I do not know,” rejoined the captain, “why you always
looked upon that attachment as something so decided. It never
appeared so to me; and you yourself say that D’Effernay is very
jealous, which I believe him to be, for he is a man of strong
passions; and this very circumstance causes me to doubt the
rest of your story. Jealousy has sharp eyes, and D’Effernay
would have discovered a rival in Hallberg, and not proved
himself the friend he always was to our poor comrade.”

“That does not follow at all,” replied the lieutenant, “it
only proves that the lovers were very cautious. So far,
however, I agree with you. I believe that if D’Effernay had
suspected anything of the kind he would have murdered
Hallberg.”

A shudder passed through Edward’s veins.

“Murdered!” he repeated, in a hollow voice; “do you not
judge too harshly of this man when you hint the possibility of
such a thing?”

“That does he, indeed,” said the old man; “these gentlemen
are all angry with D’Effernay, because he has carried off the
prettiest girl in the country. But I am told he does not intend
remaining where he now lives. He wishes to sell his
estates.”

“Really,” inquired the captain, “and where is he going?”

“I have no idea,” replied the other; “but he is selling
everything off. One manor is already disposed of, and there
have been people already in negotiation for the place where he
resides.”

The conversation now turned on the value of D’Effernay’s
property, and of land in general, &c.

Edward had gained materials enough for reflection; he rose
soon, took leave of the company, and gave himself up, in the
solitude of his own room, to the torrent of thought and feeling
which that night’s conversation had let loose. So, then, it was
true; Emily Varnier was no fabulous being! Hallberg had loved
her, his love had been returned, but a cruel destiny had
separated them. How wonderfully did all he had heard explain
the dream at the Castle, and how completely did that supply
what had remained doubtful, or had been omitted in the
officers’ narrative. Emily Varnier, doubtless, possessed that
ring, to gain possession of which now seemed his bounden duty.
He resolved not to delay its fulfillment a moment, however
difficult it might prove, and he only reflected on the best
manner in which he should perform the task allotted to him. The
sale of the property appeared to him a favorable opening. The
fame of his father’s wealth made it probable that the son might
wish to be purchaser of a fine estate, like the one in
question. He spoke openly of such a project, made inquiries of
the old gentleman, and the captain, who seemed to him to know
most about the matter; and as his duties permitted a trip for a
week or so, he started immediately, and arrived on the second
day at the place of his destination. He stopped in the public
house in the village to inquire if the estate lay near, and
whether visitors were allowed to see the house and grounds.
Mine host, who doubtless had had his directions, sent a
messenger immediately to the Castle, who returned before long,
accompanied by a chasseur, in a splendid livery, who invited
the stranger to the Castle in the name of M. D’Effernay.

This was exactly what Edward wished, and expected. Escorted
by the chasseur he soon arrived at the Castle, and was shown up
a spacious staircase into a modern, almost, one might say, a
magnificently-furnished room, where the master of the house
received him. It was evening, toward the end of winter, the
shades of twilight had already fallen, and Edward found himself
suddenly in a room quite illuminated with wax candles.
D’Effernay stood in the middle of the saloon, a tall, thin
young man. A proud bearing seemed to bespeak a consciousness of
his own merit, or at least of his position. His features were
finely formed, but the traces of strong passion, or of internal
discontent, had lined them prematurely.

In figure he was very slender, and the deep-sunken eye, the
gloomy frown which was fixed between his brows, and the thin
lips, had no very prepossessing expression, and yet there was
something imposing in the whole appearance of the man.

Edward thanked him civilly for his invitation, spoke of his
idea of being a purchaser as a motive for his visit, and gave
his own, and his father’s name. D’Effernay seemed pleased with
all he said. He had known Edward’s family in the metropolis; he
regretted that the late hour would render it impossible for
them to visit the property to-day, and concluded by pressing
the lieutenant to pass the night at the Castle. On the morrow
they would proceed to business, and now he would have the
pleasure of presenting his wife to the visitor. Edward’s heart
beat violently—at length then he would see her! Had he
loved [pg 280] her himself he could not
have gone to meet her with more agitation. D’Effernay led
his guest through many rooms, which were all as well
furnished, and as brilliantly lighted as the first he had
entered. At length he opened the door of a small boudoir,
where there was no light, save that which the faint, gray
twilight imparted through the windows.

The simple arrangement of this little room, with dark green
walls, only relieved by some engravings and coats of arms,
formed a pleasing contrast to Edward’s eyes, after the glaring
splendor of the other apartments. From behind a piano-forte, at
which she had been seated in a recess, rose a tall, slender
female form, in a white dress of extreme simplicity.

“My love,” said D’Effernay, “I bring you a welcome guest,
Lieutenant Wensleben, who is willing to purchase the
estate.”

Emily courtesied; the friendly twilight concealed the
shudder that passed over her whole frame, as she heard the
familiar name which aroused so many recollections.

She bade the stranger welcome, in a low, sweet voice, whose
tremulous accents were not unobserved by Edward; and while the
husband made some further observation, he had leisure to
remark, as well as the fading light would allow, the fair
outline of her oval face, the modest grace of her movements,
her pretty, nymph-like figure—in fact, all those charms
which seemed familiar to him through the impassioned
descriptions of his friend.

“But what can this fancy be, to sit in the dark?” asked
D’Effernay, in no mild tone; “you know that is a thing I cannot
bear.” and with these words, and without waiting his wife’s
answer, he rang the bell over her sofa, and ordered lights.

While these were placed on the table the company sat down by
the fire, and conversation commenced. By the full light Edward
could perceive all Emily’s real beauty—her pale, but
lovely face, the sad expression of her large blue eyes, so
often concealed by their dark lashes, and then raised, with a
look full of feeling, a sad, pensive, intellectual expression;
and he admired the simplicity of her dress, and of every object
that surrounded her: all appeared to him to bespeak a superior
mind.

They had not sat long, before D’Effernay was called away.
One of his people had something important, something urgent to
communicate to him, which admitted of no delay. A look of
fierce anger almost distorted his features; in an instant his
thin lips moved rapidly, and Edward thought he muttered some
curses between his teeth. He left the room, but in so doing, he
cast a glance of mistrust and ill-temper on the handsome
stranger with whom he was compelled to leave his wife alone.
Edward observed it all. All that he had seen to-day, all that
he had heard from his comrades of the man’s passionate and
suspicious disposition, convinced him that his stay here would
not be long, and that perhaps a second opportunity of speaking
alone with Emily might not offer itself.

He determined, therefore, to profit by the present moment;
and no sooner had D’Effernay left the room, than he began to
tell Emily she was not so complete a stranger to him as it
might seem; that long before he had had the pleasure of seeing
her—even before he had heard her name—she was known
to him, so to speak, in spirit.

Madame D’Effernay was moved. She was silent for a time, and
gazed fixedly on the ground; then she looked up; the mist of
unshed tears dimmed her blue eyes, and her bosom heaved with
the sigh she could not suppress.

“To me also the name of Wensleben is familiar. There is a
link between our souls. Your friend has often spoken of you to
me.”

But she could say no more; tears checked her speech.

Edward’s eyes were glistening also, and the two companions
were silent; at length he began once more:

“My dear lady,” he said, “my time is short, and I have a
solemn message to deliver to you. Will you allow me to do so
now?”

“To me?” she asked, in a tone of astonishment.

“From my departed friend,” answered Edward,
emphatically.

“From Ferdinand?—and that now—after—” she
shrunk back, as if in terror.

“Now that he is no longer with us, do you mean? I found the
message in his papers, which have been intrusted to me only
lately, since I have been in the neighborhood. Among them was a
token which I was to restore to you.” He produced the ring.
Emily seized it wildly, and trembled as she looked upon it.

“It is indeed my ring,” she said at length, “the same which
I gave him when we plighted our troth in secret. You are
acquainted with everything, I perceive; I shall therefore risk
nothing if I speak openly.”

She wept, and pressed the ring to her lips.

“I see that my friend’s memory is dear to you,” continued
Edward. You will forgive the prayer I am about to make to you:
my visit to you concerns his ring.”

“How—what is it you wish?” cried Emily; terrified.

“It was his wish,” replied Edward. “He evinced an
earnest desire to have this pledge of an unfortunate and
unfulfilled engagement restored.”

“How is that possible? You did not speak with him before his
death; and this happened so suddenly after, that, to give you
the commission—”

“There was no time for it! that is true,” answered Edward,
with an inward shudder, although outwardly he was calm.
“Perhaps this wish was awakened immediately before his death. I
found it, as I told you, expressed in those
papers.”

“Incomprehensible!” she exclaimed. “Only a short time before
his death, we cherished—deceitful, indeed, they proved,
but, oh, what blessed hopes! we reckoned on casualties, on what
might possibly occur to assist as. Neither of us could endure
to dwell on the idea of separation; and yet—yet
since—Oh, my God,” she cried, overcome by sorrow, and she
hid her face between her hands.

Edward was lost in confused thought. For a time both again
were silent: at length Emily started up—

“Forgive me, M. de Wensleben. What you have related to me,
what you have asked of me, has produced so much excitement, so
much agitation, that it is necessary that I should be alone for
a few moments, to recover my composure.”

“I am gone,” cried Edward, springing from his chair.

“No! no!” she replied, “you are my guest; remain here. I
have a household duty which calls me away.” She laid a stress
on these words.

She leant forward, and with a sad, sweet smile, she gave her
hand to the friend of her lost Ferdinand, pressing his gently,
and disappeared through the inner door.

Edward stood stunned, bewildered; then he paced the room
with hasty steps, threw himself on the sofa, and took up one of
the books that lay on the table, rather to have something in
his hand, than to read. It proved to be Young’s “Night
Thoughts.” He looked through it, and was attracted by many
passages, which seemed, in his present frame of mind, fraught
with peculiar meaning; yet his thoughts wandered constantly
from the page to his dead friend. The candles, unheeded both by
Emily and him, burned on with long wicks, giving little light
in the silent room, over which the red glare from the hearth
shed a lurid glow. Hurried footsteps sounded in the anteroom;
the door was thrown open.

Edward looked up, and saw D’Effernay staring at him, and
round the room, in an angry, restless manner.

Edward could not but think there was something almost
unearthly in those dark looks and that towering form.

“Where is my wife?” was D’Effernay’s first question.

“She is gone to fulfill some household duty,” replied the
other.

“And leaves you here alone in this miserable darkness! Most
extraordinary!—indeed, most unaccountable!” and as he
spoke he approached the table and snuffed the candles, with a
movement of impatience.

“She left me here with old friends,” said Edward, with a
forced smile. “I have been reading.”

“What, in the dark?” inquired D’Effernay, with a look of
mistrust. “It was so dark when I came in, that you could not
possibly have distinguished a letter.”

“I read for some time, and then I fell into a train of
thought, which is usually the result of reading Young’s ‘Night
Thoughts.'”

“Young! I cannot bear that author. He is so gloomy.”

“But you are fortunately so happy, that the lamentations of
the lonely mourner can find no echo in your breast.”

“You think so!” said D’Effernay, in a churlish tone, and he
pressed his lips together tightly, as Emily came into the room:
he went to meet her.

“You have been a long time away,” was his observation, as he
looked into her eyes, where the trace of tears might easily be
detected. “I found our guest alone.”

“M. de Wensleben was good enough to excuse me,” she replied;
“and then I thought you would be back immediately.”

They sat down to the table; coffee was brought, and the past
appeared to be forgotten.

The conversation at first was broken by constant pauses.
Edward saw that Emily did all she could to play the hostess
agreeably, and to pacify her husband’s ill-humor.

In this attempt the young man assisted her, and at last they
were successful. D’Effernay became more cheerful; the
conversation more animated; and Edward found that his host
could be a very agreeable member of society when he pleased,
combining a good deal of information with great natural powers.
The evening passed away more pleasantly than it promised at one
time; and after an excellent and well-served supper, the young
officer was shown into a comfortable room, fitted up with every
modern luxury; and weary in mind and body, he soon fell asleep.
He dreamed of all that had occupied his waking thoughts-of his
friend, and his friend’s history.

But in that species of confusion which often characterizes
dreams, he fancied that he was Ferdinand, or at least, his own
individuality seemed mixed up with that of Hallberg. He felt
that he was ill. He lay in an unknown room, and by his bedside
stood a small table, covered with glasses and phials,
containing medicines, as is usual in a sick room.

The door opened, and D’Effernay came in, in his
dressing-gown, as if he had just left his bed: and now in
Edward’s mind dreams and realities were mingled together, and
he thought that D’Effernay came, perhaps, to speak with him on
the occurrences of the preceding day. But no! he approached the
table on which the medicines stood, looked at the watch, took
up one of the phials and a cup, measured the draught, drop by
drop, then he turned and looked round him stealthily, and then
he drew from his breast a pale blue, coiling serpent, which he
threw into the cup, and held it to the patient’s lips, who
drank, and instantly felt a numbness creep over his frame which
ended in death. Edward fancied that he was dead; he saw the
coffin brought, but the terror lest he
[pg 282] should be buried alive,
made him start up with a sudden effort, and he opened his
eyes.

The dream had passed away; he sat in his bed safe and well;
but it was long ere he could in any degree recover his
composure, or get rid of the impression which the frightful
apparition had made on him. They brought his breakfast, with a
message from the master of the house to inquire whether he
would like to visit the park, farms, &c. He dressed
quickly, and descended to the court, where he found his host in
a riding dress, by the side of two fine horses, already
saddled. D’Effernay greeted the young man courteously; but
Edward felt an inward repugnance as he looked on that gloomy
though handsome countenance, now lighted up by the beams of the
morning sun, yet recalling vividly the dark visions of the
night. D’Effernay was full of attentions to his new friend.
They started on their ride, in spite of some threatening
clouds, and began the inspection of meadows, shrubberies,
farms, &c. After a couple of hours, which were consumed in
this manner, it began to rain a few drops, and at last burst
out into a heavy shower. It was soon impossible even to ride
through the woods for the torrents that were pouring down, and
so they returned to the castle.

Edward retired to his room to change his dress, and to write
some letters, he said, but more particularly to avoid Emily, in
order not to excite her husband’s jealousy. As the bell rang
for dinner he saw her again, and found to his surprise that the
captain, whom he had first seen in the coffee-room, and who had
given him so much information, was one of the party. He was
much pleased, for they had taken a mutual fancy to each other.
The captain was not at quarters the day Edward had left them,
but as soon as he heard where his friend had gone, he put
horses to his carriage and followed him, for he said he also
should like to see these famous estates. D’Effernay seemed in
high good humor to-day, Emily far more silent than yesterday,
and taking little part in the conversation of the men, which
turned on political economy. After coffee she found an
opportunity to give Edward (unobserved) a little packet. The
look with which she did so, told plainly what it contained, and
the young man hurried to his room as soon as he fancied he
could do so without remark or comment. The continued rain
precluded all idea of leaving the house any more that day. He
unfolded the packet; there were a couple of sheets, written
closely in a woman’s fair hand, and something wrapped carefully
in a paper, which he knew to be the ring. It was the fellow to
that which he had given the day before to Emily, only
Ferdinand’s name was engraved inside instead of hers. Such were
the contents of the papers:—

“Secrecy would be misplaced with the friend of the dead.
Therefore, will I speak to you of things which I have never
uttered to a human being until now. Jules D’Effernay is nearly
related to me. We knew each other in the Netherlands, where our
estates joined. The boy loved me already with a love that
amounted to passion; this love was my father’s greatest joy,
for there was an old and crying injustice which the ancestors
of D’Effernay had suffered from ours, that could alone, he
thought, be made up by the marriage of the only children of the
two branches. So we were destined for each other almost from
our cradles; and I was content it should be so, for Jules’s
handsome face and decided preference for me were agreeable to
me, although I felt no great affection for him. We were
separated: Jules traveled in France, England, and America, and
made money as a merchant, which profession he had taken up
suddenly. My father, who had a place under government, left his
country in consequence of political troubles, and came into
this part of the world where some distant relations of my
mother’s lived. He liked the neighborhood; he bought land; we
lived very happily; I was quite contented in Jules’s absence; I
had no yearning of the heart toward him, yet I thought kindly
of him, and troubled myself little about my future.
Then—then I learned to know your friend. Oh, then! I
felt, when I looked upon him, when I listened to him, when we
conversed together, I felt, I acknowledged that there might be
happiness on earth, of which I had hitherto never dreamed. Then
I loved for the first time, ardently, passionately, and was
beloved in return. Acquainted with the family engagements, he
did not dare openly to proclaim his love, and I knew I ought
not to foster the feeling; but, alas! how seldom does passion
listen to the voice of reason and of duty. Your friend and I
met in secret; in secret we plighted our troth, and exchanged
those rings, and hoped and believed that by showing a bold
front to our destiny we should subdue it to our will. The
commencement was sinful, it has met with a dire retribution,
Jules’s letters announced his speedy return. He had sold
everything in his own country, had given up all his mercantile
affairs, through which he had greatly increased an already
considerable fortune, and now he was about to join us, or
rather me, without whom he could not live. This appeared to me
like the demand for payment of a heavy debt. This debt I owed
to Jules, who loved me with all his heart, who was in
possession of my father’s promised word and mine also. Yet I
could not give up your friend. In a state of distraction I told
him all; we meditated flight. Yes, I was so far guilty, and I
make the confession in hopes that some portion of my errors may
be expiated by repentance. My father, who had long been in a
declining state, suddenly grew worse, and this delayed and
hindered the fulfillment of our designs. Jules arrived. During
the five years he had been away he was much changed in
appearance, and that advantageously. I was struck
[pg 283] when I first saw him, but
it was also easy to detect in those handsome features and
manly bearing, a spirit of restlessness and violence which
had already shown itself in him as a boy, and which passing
years, with their bitter experience and strong passions, had
greatly developed. The hope that we had cherished of
D’Effernay’s possible indifference to me, of the change
which time might have wrought in his attachment, now seemed
idle and absurd. His love was indeed impassioned. He
embraced me in a manner that made me shrink from him, and
altogether his deportment toward me was a strange contrast
to the gentle, tender, refined affection of our dear friend.
I trembled whenever Jules entered the room, and all that I
had prepared to say to him, all the plans which I had
revolved in my mind respecting him, vanished in an instant
before the power of his presence, and the almost imperative
manner in which he claimed my hand. My father’s illness
increased; he was now in a very precarious state, hopeless
indeed. Jules rivaled me in filial attentions to him, that I
can never cease to thank him for; but this illness made my
situation more and more critical, and it accelerated the
fulfillment of the contract. I was now to renew my promise
to him by the death-bed of my father. Alas, alas! I fell
senseless to the ground when this announcement was made to
me. Jules began to suspect. Already my cold, embarrassed
manner toward him since his return had struck him as
strange. He began to suspect, I repeat, and the effect that
this suspicion had on him, it would be impossible to
describe to you. Even now, after so long a time, now that I
am accustomed to his ways, and more reconciled to my fate by
the side of a noble, though somewhat impetuous man, it makes
me tremble to think of those paroxysms, which the idea that
I did not love him called forth. They were fearful; he
nearly sank under them. During two days his life was in
danger. At last the storm passed, my father died; Jules
watched over me with the tenderness of a brother, the
solicitude of a parent; for that indeed I shall ever be
grateful. His suspicion once awakened, he gazed round with
penetrating looks to discover the cause of my altered
feelings. But your friend never came to our house; we met in
an unfrequented spot, and my father’s illness had
interrupted these interviews. Altogether I cannot tell if
Jules discovered anything. A fearful circumstance rendered
all our precautions useless, and cut the knot of our secret
connection, to loose which voluntarily I felt I had no
power. A wedding feast, at a neighboring castle, assembled
all the nobility and gentry, and officers quartered near,
together; my deep mourning was an excuse for my absence.
Jules, though he usually was happiest by my side, could not
resist the invitation, and your friend resolved to go,
although he was unwell; he feared to raise suspicion by
remaining away, when I was left at home. With great
difficulty he contrived the first day to make one at a
splendid hunt, the second day he could not leave his bed. A
physician, who was in the house, pronounced his complaint to
be violent fever, and Jules, whose room joined that of the
sick man, offered him every little service and kindness
which compassion and good feeling prompted; and I cannot but
praise him all the more for it, as who can tell, perhaps,
his suspicion might have taken the right direction? On the
morning of the second day—but let me glance quickly at
that terrible time, the memory of which can never pass from
my mind—a fit of apoplexy most unexpectedly, but
gently, ended the noblest life, and separated us forever!
Now you know all. I inclose the ring. I cannot write more.
Farewell!”

The conclusion of the letter made a deep impression on
Edward. His dream rose up before his remembrance, the slight
indisposition, the sudden death, the fearful nursetender, all
arranged themselves in order before his mind, and an awful
whole rose out of all these reflections, a terrible suspicion
which he tried to throw off. But he could not do so, and when
he met the captain and D’Effernay in the evening, and the
latter challenged his visitors to a game of billiards, Edward
glanced from time to time at his host in a scrutinizing manner,
and could not but feel that the restless discontent which was
visible in his countenance, and the unsteady glare of his eyes,
which shunned the fixed look of others, only fitted too well
into the shape of the dark thoughts which were crossing his own
mind. Late in the evening, after supper, they played whist in
Emily’s boudoir. On the morrow, if the weather permitted, they
were to conclude their inspection of the surrounding property,
and the next day they were to visit the iron foundries, which,
although distant from the Castle several miles, formed a very
important item in the rent-roll of the estates. The company
separated for the night. Edward fell asleep; and the same
dream, with the same circumstances, recurred, only with the
full consciousness that the sick man was Ferdinand. Edward felt
overpowered, a species of horror took possession of his mind,
as he found himself now in regular communication with the
beings of the invisible world.

The weather favored D’Effernay’s projects. The whole day was
passed in the open air. Emily only appeared at meals, and in
the evening when they played at cards. Both she and Edward
avoided, as if by mutual consent, every word, every look that
could awaken the slightest suspicion or jealous feeling in
D’Effernay’s mind. She thanked him in her heart for this
forbearance, but her thoughts were in another world; she took
little heed of what passed around her. Her husband was in an
excellent temper; he played the part of host to perfection; and
when the two officers were established comfortably by the fire,
in the captain’s room, smoking together, they could not but do
justice to his courteous
manners.

“He appears to be a man of general information,” remarked
Edward.

“He has traveled a great deal, and read a great deal, as I
told you when we first met: he is a remarkable man, but one of
uncontrolled passions, and desperately jealous.”

“Yet he appears very attentive to his wife.”

“Undoubtedly he is wildly in love with her; yet he makes her
unhappy, and himself too.”

“He certainly does not appear happy, there is so much
restlessness.”

“He can never bear to remain in one place for any length of
time together. He is now going to sell the property he only
bought last year. There is an instability about him; everything
palls on him.”

“That is the complaint of many who are rich and well to do
in the world.”

“Yes; only not in the same degree. I assure you it has often
struck me that man must have a bad conscience.”

“What an idea!” rejoined Edward, with a forced laugh, for
the captain’s remark struck him forcibly. “He seems a man of
honor.”

“Oh, one may be a man of honor, as it is called, and yet
have something quite bad enough to reproach yourself with. But
I know nothing about it, and would not breathe such a thing
except to you. His wife, too, looks so pale and so
oppressed.”

“But, perhaps, that is her natural complexion and
expression.”

“Oh, no! no! the year before D’Effernay came from Paris, she
was as fresh as a rose. Many people declare that your poor
friend loved her. The affair was wrapped in mystery, and I
never believed the report, for Hallberg was a steady man, and
the whole country knew that Emily had been engaged a long
time.”

“Hallberg never mentioned the name in his letters,” answered
Edward, with less candor than usual.

“I thought not. Besides D’Effernay was very much attached to
him, and mourned his death.”

“Indeed!”

“I assure you the morning that Hallberg was found dead in
his bed so unexpectedly, D’Effernay was like one beside
himself.”

“Very extraordinary. But as we are on the subject, tell me,
I pray you, all the circumstances of my poor Ferdinand’s
illness, and awful sudden death.”

“I can tell you all about it, as well as any one, for I was
one of the guests at that melancholy wedding. Your friend, and
I, and many others were invited. Hallberg had some idea of not
going; he was unwell, with violent headache and giddiness. But
we persuaded him, and he consented to go with us. The first day
he felt tolerably well. We hunted in the open field; we were
all on horseback, the day hot. Hallberg felt worse. The second
day he had a great deal of fever; he could not stay up. The
physician (for fortunately there was one in the company)
ordered rest, cooling medicine, neither of which seemed to do
him good. The rest of the men dispersed, to amuse themselves in
various ways. Only D’Effernay remained at home; he was never
very fond of large societies, and we voted that he was
discontented and out of humor because his betrothed bride was
not with him. His room was next to the sick man’s, to whom he
gave all possible care and attention, for poor Hallberg,
besides being ill, was in despair at giving so much trouble in
a strange house. D’Effernay tried to calm him on this point; he
nursed him, amused him with conversation, mixed his medicines,
and, in fact, showed more kindness and tenderness, than any of
us would have given him credit for. Before I went to bed I
visited Hallberg, and found him much better, and more cheerful;
the doctor had promised that he should leave his bed next day.
So I left him and retired with the rest of the world, rather
late, and very tired, to rest. The next morning I was awoke by
the fatal tidings. I did not wait to dress, I ran to his room,
it was full of people.”

“And how, how was the death first discovered?” inquired
Edward, in breathless eagerness.

“The servant, who came in to attend on him, thought he was
asleep, for he lay in his usual position, his head upon his
hand. He went away and waited for some time; but hours passed,
and he thought he ought to wake his master to give him his
medicine. Then the awful discovery was made. He must have died
peacefully, for his countenance was so calm, his limbs
undisturbed. A fit of apoplexy had terminated his life, but in
the most tranquil manner.”

“Incomprehensible,” said Edward, with a deep sigh. “Did they
take no measures to restore animation?”

“Certainly; all that could be done was done, bleeding,
fomentation, friction; the physician superintended, but there
was no hope, it was all too late. He must have been dead some
hours, for he was already cold and stiff. If there had been a
spark of life in him he would have been saved. It was all over;
I had lost my good lieutenant, and the regiment one of its
finest officers.”

He was silent, and appeared lost in thought. Edward, for his
part, felt overwhelmed by terrible suspicions and sad memories.
After a long pause he recovered himself: “and where was
D’Effernay?” he inquired.

“D’Effernay,” answered the Captain, rather surprised at the
question; “oh! he was not in the Castle when we made the
dreadful discovery: he had gone out for an early walk, and when
he came back late, not before noon, he learned the truth, and
was like one out of his senses. It seemed so awful to him,
because he had been so much, the very day before, with poor
Hallberg.”

“Aye,” answered Edward, whose suspicions were being more and
more confirmed every moment. “And did he see the corpse, did he
go into the chamber of death?”

“No,” replied the captain; “he assured us
[pg 285] it was out of his power to
do so; he could not bear the sight; and I believe it. People
with such uncontrolled feelings as this D’Effernay, are
incapable of performing those duties which others think it
necessary and incumbent on them to fulfill.”

“And where was Hallberg buried?”

“Not far from the castle where the mournful event took
place. To-morrow, if we go to the iron foundry, we shall be
near the spot.”

“I am glad of it,” cried Edward eagerly, while a host of
projects rose up in his mind. “But now, captain, I will not
trespass any longer on your kindness. It is late, and we must
be up betimes to-morrow. How far have we to go?”

“Not less than four leagues certainly. D’Effernay has
arranged that we shall drive there, and see it all at our
leisure: then we shall return in the evening. Good night,
Wensleben.”

They separated: Edward hurried to his room; his heart
overflowed. Sorrow on the one hand, horror and even hatred on
the other, agitated him by turns. It was long before he could
sleep. For the third time the vision haunted him; but now it
was clearer than before; now he saw plainly the features of him
who lay in bed, and of him who stood beside the bed—they
were those of Hallberg and of D’Effernay.

This third apparition, the exact counterpart of the two
former (only more vivid), all that he had gathered from
conversations on the subject, and the contents of Emily’s
letter, left scarcely the shadow of a doubt remaining as to how
his friend had left the world.

D’Effernay’s jealous and passionate nature seemed to allow
of the possibility of such a crime, and it could scarcely be
wondered at, if Edward regarded him with a feeling akin to
hatred. Indeed the desire of visiting Hallberg’s grave, in
order to place the ring in the coffin, could alone reconcile
Wensleben to the idea of remaining any longer beneath the roof
of a man whom he now considered the murderer of his friend. His
mind was a prey to conflicting doubts; detestation for the
culprit, and grief for the victim, pointed out one line of
conduct, while the difficulty of proving D’Effernay’s guilt,
and still more, pity and consideration for Emily, determined
him at length to let the matter rest, and to leave the
murderer, if such he really were, to the retribution which his
own conscience and the justice of God would award him. He would
seek his friend’s grave, and then he would separate from
D’Effernay, and never see him more. In the midst of these
reflections the servant came to tell him that the carriage was
ready. A shudder passed over his frame as D’Effernay greeted
him; but he commanded himself, and they started on their
expedition.

Edward spoke but little, and that only when it was
necessary, and the conversation was kept up by his two
companions; he had made every inquiry, before he set out,
respecting the place of his friend’s interment, the exact
situation of the tomb, the name of the village, and its
distance from the main road. On their way home, he requested
that D’Effernay would give orders to the coachman to make a
round of a mile or two as far as the village of ——,
with whose rector he was particularly desirous to speak. A
momentary cloud gathered on D’Effernay’s brow, yet it seemed no
more than his usual expression of vexation at any delay or
hindrance; and he was so anxious to propitiate his rich
visitor, who appeared likely to take the estate off his hands,
that he complied with all possible courtesy. The coachman was
directed to turn down a by-road, and a very bad one it was. The
captain stood up in the carriage and pointed out the village to
him, at some distance off; it lay in a deep ravine at the foot
of the mountains.

They arrived in the course of time, and inquired for the
clergyman’s house, which, as well as the church, was situated
on rising ground. The three companions alighted from the
carriage, which they left at the bottom of the hill, and walked
up together in the direction of the rectory. Edward knocked at
the door and was admitted, while the two others sat on a bench
outside. He had promised to return speedily, but to
D’Effernay’s restless spirit, one-quarter of an hour appeared
interminable.

He turned to the captain and said, in a tone of impatience,
“M. de Wensleben must have a great deal of business with the
rector: we have been here an immense time, and he does not seem
inclined to make his appearance.

“Oh, I dare say he will come soon. The matter cannot detain
him long.”

“What on earth can he have to do here?”

“Perhaps you would call it a mere fancy—the enthusiasm
of youth.”

“It has a name, I suppose?”

“Certainly, but—”

“Is it sufficiently important, think you, to make us run the
risk of being benighted on such roads as these?”

“Why, it is quite early in the day.”

“But we have more than two leagues to go. Why will you not
speak?—there cannot any great mystery.”

“Well, perhaps not a mystery, exactly, but just one of those
subjects on which we are usually reserved with others.”

“So! so!” rejoined D’Effernay, with a little sneer. “Some
love affair; some girl or another who pursues him, that he
wants to get rid of.”

“Nothing of the kind, I can assure you,” replied the captain
drily. “It could scarcely be more innocent. He wishes, in fact,
to visit his friend’s grave.”

The listener’s expression was one of scorn and anger. “It is
worth the trouble certainly,” he exclaimed, with a mocking
laugh. “A charming sentimental pilgrimage, truly; and pray who
is this beloved friend, over whose resting-place he must shed a
tear and [pg 286] plant a forget-me-not? He
told me he had never been in the neighborhood before.”

“No more he had; neither did he know where poor Hallberg was
buried until I told him.”

“Hallberg!” echoed the other in a tone that startled the
captain, and caused him to turn and look fixedly in the
speaker’s face. It was deadly pale, and the captain observed
the effort which D’Effernay made to recover his composure.

“Hallberg!” he repeated again, in a calmer tone, “and was
Wensleben a friend of his?”

“His bosom friend from childhood. They were brought up
together at the academy. Hallberg left it a year earlier than
his friend.”

“Indeed!” said D’Effernay, scowling as he spoke, and working
himself up into a passion. “And this lieutenant came here on
this account, then, and the purchase of the estates was a mere
excuse.”

“I beg your pardon,” observed the captain, in a decided tone
of voice; “I have already told you that it was I who informed
him of the place where his friend lies buried.”

“That may be, but it was owing to his friendship, to the
wish to learn something further of his fate, that we are
indebted for the visit of this romantic knight-errant.”

“That does not appear likely,” replied the captain, who
thought it better to avert, if possible, the rising storm of
his companion’s fury. “Why should he seek for news of Hallberg
here, when he comes from the place where he was quartered for a
long time, and where all his comrades now are.”

“Well, I don’t know,” cried D’Effernay, whose passion was
increasing every moment. “Perhaps you have heard what was once
gossiped about the neighborhood, that Hallberg was an admirer
of my wife before she married.”

“Oh yes, I have heard that report, but never believed it.
Hallberg was a prudent, steady man, and every one knew that
Mademoiselle Varnier’s hand had been promised for some
time.”

“Yes! yes! but you do not know to what lengths passion and
avarice may lead: for Emily was rich. We must not forget that,
when we discuss the matter; an elopement with the rich heiress
would have been a fine thing for a poor, beggarly
lieutenant.”

“Shame! shame! M. D’Effernay. How can you slander the
character of that upright young man? If Hallberg were so
unhappy as to love Mademoiselle Varnier—”

“That he did! you may believe me so far, I had reason to
know it, and I did know it.”

“We had better change the conversation altogether, as it has
taken so unpleasant a turn, Hallberg is dead; his errors, be
they what they may, lie buried with him. His name stands high
with all who knew him Even you, M. D’Effernay—you were
his friend.”

“I his friend? I hated him!—I loathed him!” D’Effernay
could not proceed; he foamed at the mouth with rage.

“Compose yourself!” said the Captain, rising as he spoke;
“you look and speak like a madman.”

A madman! Who says I am mad? Now I see it all—the
connection of the whole—the shameful conspiracy.”

“Your conduct is perfectly incomprehensible to me,” answered
the captain, with perfect coolness. “Did you not attend
Hallberg in his last illness, and give him his medicines with
your own hand?”

“I!” stammered D’Effernay. “No! no! no!” he cried, while the
captain’s growing suspicions increased every moment, on account
of the perturbation which his companion displayed. “I never
gave his medicines; whoever says that is a liar.”

“I say it!” exclaimed the officer, in a loud tone, for his
patience was exhausted. “I say it, because I know that it was
so, and I will maintain that fact against any one at any time.
If you choose to contradict the evidence of my senses, it is
you who are a liar!”

“Ha! you shall give me satisfaction for this insult. Depend
upon it, I am not one to be trifled with, as you shall find.
You shall retract your words.”

“Never! I am ready to defend every word I have uttered here
on this spot, at this moment, if you please. You have your
pistols in the carriage, you know.”

D’Effernay cast a look of hatred on the speaker, and then
dashing down the little hill, to the surprise of the servants,
he dragged the pistols from the sword-case, and was by the
captain’s side in a moment. But the loud voices of the
disputants had attracted Edward to the spot, and there he stood
on D’Effernay’s return; and by his side a venerable old man,
who carried a large bunch of keys in his hand.

“In heaven’s name, what has happened?” cried Wensleben.

“What are you about to do?” interposed the rector, in a tone
of authority, though his countenance was expressive of horror.
“Are you going to commit murder on this sacred spot, close to
the precincts of the church?”

“Murder! who speaks of murder?” cried D’Effernay. “Who can
prove it?” and as he spoke, the captain turned a fierce,
penetrating look upon him, beneath which he quailed.

“But, I repeat the question,” Edward began once more, “what
does all this mean? I left you a short time ago in friendly
conversation. I come back and find you both armed—both
violently agitated—and M. D’Effernay, at least, speaking
incoherently. What do you mean by ‘proving it?’—to what
do you allude?” At this moment, before any answer could be
made, a man came out of the house with a pick-axe and shovel on
his shoulder, and advancing toward the
[pg 287] rector, said respectfully,
“I am quite ready, sir, if you have the key of the
churchyard.”

It was now the captain’s turn to look anxious: “What are you
going to do, you surely don’t intend—?” but as he spoke,
the rector interrupted him.

“This gentleman is very desirous to see the place where his
friend lies buried.”

“But these preparations, what do they mean?”

“I will tell you,” said Edward, in a voice and tone that
betrayed the deepest emotion, “I have a holy duty to perform. I
must cause the coffin to be opened.”

“How, what!” screamed D’Effernay, once again. “Never—I
will never permit such a thing.”

“But, sir,” the old man spoke, in a tone of calm decision,
contrasting wonderfully with the violence of him whom he
addressed, “you have no possible right to interfere. If this
gentleman wishes it, and I accede to the proposition, no one
can prevent us from doing as we would.”

“I tell you I will not suffer it,” continued D’Effernay,
with the same frightful agitation. “Stir at your peril,” he
cried, turning sharply round upon the grave-digger, and holding
a pistol to his head; but the captain pulled his arm away, to
the relief of the frightened peasant.

“M. D’Effernay,” he said, “your conduct for the last
half-hour has been most unaccountable—most
unreasonable.”

“Come, come,” interposed Edward, “Let us say no more on the
subject; but let us be going,” he addressed the rector; “we
will not detain these gentlemen much longer.”

He made a step toward the churchyard, but D’Effernay
clutched his arm, and, with an impious oath, “you shall not
stir,” he said; “that grave shall not be opened.”

Edward shook him off, with a look of silent hatred, for now
indeed all his doubts were confirmed.

D’Effernay saw that Wensleben was resolved, and a deadly
pallor spread itself over his features, and a shudder passed
visibly over his frame.

“You are going!” he cried, with every gesture and appearance
of insanity. “Go, then;” … and he pointed the muzzle of the
pistol to his mouth, and before any one could prevent him, he
drew the trigger, and fell back a corpse. The spectators were
motionless with surprise and horror; the captain was the first
to recover himself in some degree. He bent over the body with
the faint hope of detecting some sign of life. The old man
turned pale and dizzy with a sense of terror, and he looked as
if he would have swooned, had not Edward led him gently into
his house, while the two others busied themselves with vain
attempts to restore life.

The spirit of D’Effernay had gone to its last account!

It was, indeed, an awful moment. Death in its worst shape
was before them, and a terrible duty still remained to be
performed.

Edward’s cheek was blanched; his eye had a fixed look, yet
he moved and spoke with a species of mechanical action, which
had something almost ghastly in it. Causing the body to be
removed into the house, he bade the captain summon the servants
of the deceased, and then motioning with his hand to the
awe-struck sexton, he proceeded with him to the churchyard. A
few clods of earth alone were removed ere the captain stood by
his friend’s side.

Here we must pause. Perhaps it were better altogether to
emulate the silence that was maintained then and afterward by
the two comrades. But the sexton could not be bribed to entire
secrecy, and it was a story he loved to tell, with details we
gladly omit, of how Wensleben solemnly performed his
task—of how no doubt could any longer exist as to the
cause of Hallberg’s death. Those who love the horrible must
draw on their own imaginations to supply what we resolutely
withhold.

Edward, we believe, never alluded to D’Effernay’s death, and
all the awful circumstances attending it, but twice—once,
when, with every necessary detail, he and the captain gave
their evidence to the legal authorities; and once, with as few
details as possible, when he had an interview with the widow of
the murderer, the beloved of the victim. The particulars of
this interview he never divulged, for he considered Emily’s
grief too sacred to be exposed to the prying eyes of the
curious and the unfeeling. She left the neighborhood
immediately, leaving her worldly affairs in Wensleben’s hands,
who soon disposed of the property for her. She returned to her
native country, with the resolution of spending the greater
part of her wealth in relieving the distresses of others,
wisely seeking, in the exercise of piety and benevolence, the
only possible alleviation of her own deep and many-sided
griefs. For Edward, he was soon pronounced to have recovered
entirely from the shock of these terrible events. Of a
courageous and energetic disposition, he pursued the duties of
his profession with a firm step, and hid his mighty sorrow deep
in the recesses of his heart. To the superficial observer,
tears, groans, and lamentations are the only proofs of sorrow:
and when they subside, the sorrow is said to have passed away
also. Thus the captive, immured within the walls of his
prison-house, is as one dead to the outward world, though the
gaoler be a daily witness to the vitality of affliction.

Paris has been again emptied of its citizens to see M.
Poitevin make his second ascent on horseback from the Champ de
Mars. To show that he was not fastened to his saddle, the
idiot, when some hundred yards up in the air, stood upright on
his horse, and saluted the multitude below with both his
hands.

PEASANT LIFE IN GERMANY.

We copy the following interesting paragraph from a work just
issued in London on “The Social Condition and Education of the
People of England and Europe,” by Joseph Kay, of Cambridge
University.

“As I have already said, the moral, intellectual and
physical condition of the peasants and operatives of
Prussia, Saxony and other parts of Germany, of Holland, and
of the Protestant cantons of Switzerland, and the social
condition of the peasants in the greater part of France,
is very much higher and happier, and very much more
satisfactory, than that of the peasants and operatives of
England; the condition of the poor in the North
German, Swiss and Dutch towns, is as remarkable a
contrast to that of the poor of the English towns as
can well be imagined; and that the condition of the
poorer classes of Germany, Switzerland, Holland and
France is rapidly improving. The great
superiority of the preparation for life which
a poor man receives in those countries I have
mentioned, to that which a peasant or operative receives
in England, and the difference of the social
position of a poor man in those countries to that of a
peasant or operative in England, seem sufficient to explain
the difference which exists between the moral and social
condition of the poor of our own country and of the other
countries I have named. In Germany, Holland, and
Switzerland, a child begins its life in the society of
parents who have been educated and brought up for years in
the company of learned and gentlemanly professors, and in
the society and under the direction of a father who has
been exercised in military arts, and who has acquired the
bearing, the clean and orderly habits, and the taste for
respectable attire, which characterize the soldier. The
children of these countries spend the first six years of
their lives in homes which are well regulated. They are
during this time accustomed to orderly habits, to neat and
clean clothes, and to ideas of the value of instruction, of
the respect due to the teachers, and of the excellence of
the schools, by parents who have, by their training in
early life, acquired such tastes and ideas themselves. Each
child at the age of six begins to attend a school, which is
perfectly clean, well ventilated, directed by an able and
well-educated gentleman, and superintended by the religious
ministers and by the inspectors of the Government. Until
the completion of its fourteenth year, each child
continues regular daily attendance at one of these schools,
daily strengthening its habits of cleanliness and order,
learning the rudiments of useful knowledge, receiving the
principles of religion and morality, and gaining confirmed
health and physical energy by the exercise and drill of the
school playground. No children are left idle in the
streets of the towns; no children are allowed to grovel in
the gutters; no children are allowed to make their
appearance at the schools dirty, or in ragged clothes; and
the local authorities are obliged to clothe all whose
parents cannot afford to clothe them. The children of the
poor of Germany, Holland and Switzerland acquire
stronger habits of cleanliness, neatness and industry at
the primary schools, than the children of the
small shopkeeping classes of England do at the
private schools of England; and they leave the primary
schools of these countries much better
instructed than those who leave our middle class
private schools. After having learnt reading, writing,
arithmetic, singing, geography, history and the Scriptures,
the children leave the schools, carrying with them into
life habits of cleanliness, neatness, order and industry,
and awakened intellect, capable of collecting truths and
reasoning upon them.”

[From the Dublin University Magazine.]

SUMMER PASTIME.

R.C.

True genius is perpetual youth, health, serenity, and
strength. The eye is bright with a fine fire that is undimmed
by time, and the mind, not sharing the body’s decline from the
prime of middle age, continues on with illimitable accession of
spiritual power.

Our convictions should be based on conceptions got from
insight of principles, and not upon opinions spawned of
authority and expediency. Every man shall influence me, no man
can decide for me.

[From the Spirit of the Times]

REMINISCENCES OF SARGENT S. PRENTISS, OF MISSISSIPPI.

BY T.B. THORPE.

AUTHOR OF “TOM OWEN, THE BEE HUNTER.”

The death of Sargeant S. Prentiss has called forth an
universal feeling of sorrow; the consciousness that “a great
man has fallen” is depicted upon the faces of the
multitude.

The eloquent offerings to his virtues and to his genius that
everywhere follow the news of his demise, are but slight tokens
of that sorrow that fills the heart of all who knew the gifted
Prentiss. Having known him long, and having had frequent
occasions to witness exhibitions of his great mental powers, I
cannot refrain from paying an imperfect tribute to his
memory.

I first met Mr. Prentiss when he was in the full maturity of
his power, but I have the pleasure of knowing hundreds who were
well acquainted with his early history and early triumphs.
Volumes of interest might be written upon the life of Mr.
Prentiss. And then his high sense of honor, his brave spirit,
his nobleness of soul, his intense but commendable pride, his
classical attainments, and his deep knowledge of the law, can
scarcely be illustrated, so universal and superior were his
accomplishments and acquirements.

In his early career, I consider Mr. Prentiss both fortunate
and unfortunate. I have often imagined the shrinking but proud
boy, living unnoticed and unknown among the wealthiest citizens
of the south. Buried in the obscurity of his humble school, he
looked out upon the busy world, and measured the mighty
capacities of his own soul with those whom society had placed
above him. I think I see him brooding over his position, and
longing to be free, as the suffocating man longs for the
boundless air of heaven. His hour of triumph came, and
surpassed, perhaps, his own aspirations. From the schoolroom he
entered that of the court—a chance offered—a
position gained—the law his theme, he at once not only
equaled, but soared even beyond the aim of the most favored of
his compeers.

The era was one of extravagance. The virgin soil of
Mississippi was pouring into the laps of her generous sons
untold abundance. There were thousands of her citizens, full of
health and talent, who adorned excesses of living by the
tasteful procurements of wealth, and the highest
accomplishments of mind. Into this world Prentiss entered,
heralded by naught save his own genius. The heirs of princely
fortunes, the descendants of heroes, men of power and place, of
family pride, of national associations, were not more proud,
more gallant, than was Prentiss, for “he was reckoned among the
noblest Romans of them all.”

Each step in his new fortune seemed only to elicit new
qualities for admiration. At the forum he dazzled—the
jury and the judge were confounded—the crowd carried him
to the stump, and the multitude listened as to one inspired.
Fair ladies vied with each other in waving tiny hands in token
of admiration—the stolid judges of the Supreme Court
wondered at the mind of the apparent boy—even the walls
of Congress echoed forth pæans to his praise. His course was as
rapid and brilliant as that of the meteor that suddenly springs
athwart the heavens, but he was human and accomplished his
task, herculean as he was, at the price of an injured
constitution.

In personal appearance Prentiss was eminently handsome, and
yet eminently manly. Although of medium height, there was that
in the carriage of his head that was astonishingly impressive.
I shall never forget him on one occasion, “in ’44,” when he
rose at a public meeting to reply to an antagonist worthy of
his steel. His whole soul was roused, his high smooth forehead
fairly coruscated. He remained silent for some seconds, and
only looked. The bald eagle never glanced so fiercely
from his eyry. It seemed as if his deep blue eye would distend
until it swallowed up the thousands of his audience. For an
instant the effect was painful; he saw it and smiled, when a
cheer burst from the admiring multitude that fairly shook the
earth.

His voice was clear and sweet, and could be heard at an
immense distance, and yet, to be all like Demosthenes, he had a
perceptible impediment in his speech. As a reader he had no
superior. His narration was clear and unadorned, proper
sentences were subduedly humorous, but the impressive parts
were delivered with an effect that reminded me of the elder
Kean.

His imagination was unsurpassed, and the rich stores of his
mind supplied him with never-ending material, quoted and
original. The slightest allusion to anything gave him the key
to all its peculiarities if he had occasion to allude to the
diamond, its bed in the Golconda, its discovery by some poor
native, its being associated with commerce, its polish by the
lapidary, its adorning the neck of beauty, its rays brilliant
and serene, its birth, its life, its history, all flashed upon
him. So with every idea in the vast storehouse of his mind. He
seemed to know all things, in mass and in particulars, never
confused, never at a loss—the hearer listened, wondered,
and dreamed. Thoughts of moment came forth as demanded, but ten
thousand other thoughts rare and beautiful, continued to bubble
up, after all effort ceased.

No man had a more delicate or subtle wit than Prentiss, or a
more Falstaffian humor when it suited his purpose. Who will
ever forget the spending of a social dinner hour with him, when
his health was high and his mind at ease? Who so
lovely?—who so refined? What delight was exhibited by
sweet ladies who listened to his words! Who could so eloquently
discourse of roses and buds, of
[pg 290] lilies and pearls, of eyes
and graces, of robes and angels, and yet never offend the
most sensitive of the sex, or call other than the blush of
pleasure and joy to the cheek? Who could, on the “public
day,” ascend so gracefully from the associations of tariffs,
and banks, and cotton, and sugar, to greet the fair ladies
that honored him with their presence? How he would lean
toward them, as he dwelt upon “the blessed of all God’s
handiwork,” compared their bright eyes to “day-stars” that
lit up the dark recesses of his own clouded imagination; and
how he would revel, like another Puck, among the rays and
beams of smiles called forth by his own happy
compliments—and how he would change from all this, and
in an instant seemingly arm himself with the thunderbolts of
Jove, which he would dash with appalling sound among his
antagonists, or at principles he opposed, and yet with such
a charm, with such a manner, that these very daughters of
the sunny South who had listened to his syren-song so
admiringly, would now stare, and wonder, and pallor, and yet
listen, even as one gazes over the precipice, and is
fascinated at the very nearness to destruction.

Prentiss had originally a constitution of iron; his frame
was so perfect in its organization, that, in spite of the most
extraordinary negligence of health, his muscles had all the
compactness, glossiness, and distinctiveness of one who had
specially trained by diet and exercise. It was this
constitution that enabled him to accomplish so much in so short
a time. He could almost wholly discard sleep for weeks, with
apparent impunity; he could eat or starve; do anything that
would kill ordinary men, yet never feel a twinge of pain. I saw
him once amidst a tremendous political excitement; he had been
talking, arguing, dining, visiting, and traveling, without rest
for three whole days. His companions would steal away at times
for sleep, but Prentiss was like an ever-busy spirit, here, and
there, and everywhere. The morning of the fourth day came, and
he was to appear before an audience familiar with his fame, but
one that had never heard him speak; an audience critical in the
last degree, he desired to succeed, for more was depending than
he had ever before had cause to stake upon such an occasion.
Many felt a fear that he would be unprepared. I mingled in the
expecting crowd: I saw ladies who had never honored the stump
with their presence struggling for seats, counselors,
statesmen, and professional men, the elite of a great city,
were gathered together. An hour before I had seen Prentiss,
still apparently ignorant of his engagement.

The time of trial came, and the remarkable man presented
himself, the very picture of buoyant health, of unbroken rest.
All this had been done by the unyielding resolve of his
will—his triumph was complete; high-wrought
expectations were more than realized, prejudice was demolished,
professional jealousy silenced, and he descended from the
rostrum, freely accorded his proper place among the orators and
statesmen of the “Southern Metropolis.”

Mr. Clay visited the South in the fall of ’44, and, as he
was then candidate for the Presidency, he attracted in New
Orleans, if possible, more than usual notice. His hotel was the
St. Charles; toward noon he reached that magnificent palace.
The streets presented a vast ocean of heads, and every building
commanding a view was literally covered with human beings. The
great “Statesman of the West” presented himself to the
multitude between the tall columns of the finest portico in the
world. The scene was beyond description, and of vast interest.
As the crowd swayed to and fro, a universal shout was raised
for Mr. Clay to speak; he uttered a sentence or two, waved his
hand in adieu, and escaped amidst the prevailing confusion.
Prentiss meanwhile was at a side window, evidently unconscious
of being himself noticed, gazing upon what was passing with all
the delight of the humblest spectator. Suddenly his name was
announced. He attempted to withdraw from public gaze, but his
friends pushed him forward. Again his name was shouted, hats
and caps were thrown in the air, and he was finally compelled
to show himself on the portico. With remarkable delicacy, he
chose a less prominent place than that previously occupied by
Mr. Clay, although perfectly visible. He thanked his friends
for their kindness by repeated bows, and by such smiles as he
alone could give. “A speech! A speech!” thundered a thousand
voices. Prentiss lifted his hand; in an instant everything was
still—then pointing to the group that surrounded Mr.
Clay, he said, “Fellow-citizens, when the eagle is soaring in
the sky, the owls and the bats retire to their holes.” And long
before the shout that followed this remark had ceased, Prentiss
had disappeared amid the multitude.

But the most extraordinary exhibition of Prentiss’ powers of
mind and endurance of body, was shown while he was running for
Congress. He had the whole State to canvass, and the magnitude
of the work was just what he desired. From what I have learned
from anecdotes, that canvass must have presented some scenes
combining the highest mental and physical exertion that was
ever witnessed in the world. Prentiss was in perfect health,
and in the first blush of success, and it cannot be doubted but
that his best efforts of oratory were then made, and now live
recorded only in the fading memories of his hearers. An
incident illustrative of the time is remembered, that may hear
repeating.

The whole state of Mississippi was alive with excitement;
for the moment, she felt that her sovereign dignity had been
trifled with, and that her reputation demanded the return of
Prentiss to Congress. Crowds followed him from place to place,
making a gala time of weeks together. Among the
[pg 291] shrewd worldlings who take
advantage of such times “to coin money,” was the proprietor
of a traveling menagerie, and he soon found out that the
multitude followed Prentiss. Getting the list of that
remarkable man’s “appointments,” he filled up his own, and
it was soon noticed as a remarkable coincidence, that the
orator always “arrived along with the other ‘lions.'” The
reason of this meeting was discovered, and the “boys”
decided that Prentiss should “next time” speak from the top
of the lion’s cage. Never was the menagerie more crowded. At
the proper time, the candidate gratified his constituents,
and mounted his singular rostrum. I was told by a person,
who professed to be an eye witness, that the whole affair
presented a singular mixture of the terrible and the
comical. Prentiss was, as usual, eloquent, and, as if
ignorant of the novel circumstances with which he was
surrounded, went deeply into the matter in hand, his
election. For a while the audience and the animals were
quiet, the former listening, the latter eyeing the speaker
with grave intensity. The first burst of applause
electrified the menagerie; the elephant threw his trunk into
the air and echoed back the noise, while the tigers and
bears significantly growled. On went Prentiss, and as each
peculiar animal vented his rage or approbation, he most
ingeniously wrought in its habits, as a facsimile of some
man or passion. In the meanwhile, the stately king of
beasts, who had been quietly treading the mazes of his
prison, became alarmed at the footsteps over his head, and
placing his mouth upon the floor of his cage, made
everything shake by his terrible roar. This, joined with the
already excited feelings of the audience, caused the ladies
to shriek, and a fearful commotion for a moment followed.
Prentiss, equal to every occasion, changed his tone and
manner; he commenced a playful strain, and introduced the
fox, the jackal, and hyena, and capped the climax by
likening some well known political opponent to a grave
baboon that presided over the “cage with monkeys”; the
resemblance was instantly recognized, and bursts of laughter
followed, that literally set many into convulsions. The
baboon, all unconscious of the attention he was attracting,
suddenly assumed a grimace, and then a serious face, when
Prentiss exclaimed—”I see, my fine fellow, that your
feelings are hurt by my unjust comparison, and I humbly beg
your pardon.” The effect of all this may be vaguely
imagined, but it cannot be described.

Of Prentiss’ power before a jury too much cannot be said.
Innumerable illustrations might be gathered up, showing that he
far surpassed any living advocate. “The trial of the
Wilkinsons” might be cited, although it was far from being one
of his best efforts. Two young men, only sons, and deeply
attached as friends, quarreled, and in the mad excitement of
the moment, one of them was killed. Upon the trial, the
testimony of the mother of the deceased was so direct, that it
seemed to render “the clearing of the prisoner” hopeless.
Prentiss spoke to the witness in the blandest manner and most
courtly style. The mother, arrayed in weeds, and bowed down
with sorrow, turned toward Prentiss, and answered his inquiries
with all the dignity of a perfectly accomplished lady—she
calmly uttered the truth, and every word she spoke rendered the
defense apparently more hopeless.

“Would you punish that young man with death?” said Prentiss,
pointing to the prisoner.

The questioned looked, and answered—”He has made me
childless, let the law take its course.”

“And would wringing his mother’s heart and hurrying her gray
hairs with sorrow into the grave, by rendering her childless,
assuage your grief?”

All present were dissolved in tears—even convulsive
sobbing was heard in the courtroom.

“No!” said the witness, with all the gushing tenderness of a
mother—”No! I would not add a sorrow to her heart, nor
that of her son!”

Admissions in the evidence followed, and hopes were uttered
for the prisoner’s acquittal, that changed the whole character
of the testimony. What was a few moments before so dark, grew
light, and without the slightest act that might be construed
into an unfair advantage, in the hands of Prentiss, the witness
pleaded for the accused.

Soon after Mr. Prentiss settled in New Orleans, a meeting
was held to raise funds for the erection of a suitable monument
to Franklin. On that occasion, the lamented Wilde and the
accomplished McCaleb delivered ornate and chaste addresses upon
the value of art, and the policy of enriching New Orleans with
its exhibition. At the close of the meeting, as the audience
rose to depart, some one discovered Prentiss, and calling his
name, it was echoed from all sides—he tried to escape,
but was literally carried on the stand.

As a rich specimen of off-hand eloquence, I think the
address he delivered on that occasion was unequaled. Unlike any
other speech, he had the arts to deal with, and of course the
associations were of surpassing splendor. I knew that he was
ignorant of the technicalities of art, and had paid but little
attention to their study, and my surprise was unbounded to see
him, thus unexpectedly called upon, instantly arrange in his
mind ideas, and expressing facts and illustrations that would
have done honor to Burke, when dwelling upon the sublime and
beautiful. Had he been bred to the easel, or confined to the
sculptor’s room, he could not have been more familiar with the
details of the studio—he painted with all the brilliancy
of Titian, and with the correctness of Raphael, while his
images in marble combined the softness of Praxiteles, and the
nervous energy of [pg 292] Michael Angelo. All this
with Prentiss was intuition—I believe that the whole
was the spontaneous thought of the moment, the crude
outlines that floated through his mind being filled up by
the intuitive teachings of his surpassing genius. His
conclusion was gorgeous—he passed Napoleon to the
summit of the Alps—his hearers saw him and his steel
clad warriors threading the snows of Mount St. Bernard, and
having gained the dizzy height, Prentiss represented “the
man of destiny” looking down upon the sunny plains of Italy,
and then with a mighty swoop, descending from the clouds and
making the grasp of Empire secondary to that of Art.

I had the melancholy pleasure of hearing his last, and, it
would seem to me, his greatest speech. Toward the close of the
last Presidential campaign, I found him in the interior of the
State, endeavoring to recruit his declining health. He had been
obliged to avoid all public speaking, and had gone far into the
country to get away from excitement. But there was a
“gathering” near by his temporary home, and he consented to be
present. It was late in the evening when he ascended the
“stand,” which was supported by the trunks of two magnificent
forest trees, through which the setting sun poured with
picturesque effect. The ravages of ill health were apparent
upon his face, and his high massive forehead was paler, and
seemingly more transparent than usual. His audience, some three
or four hundred, was composed in a large degree of his old and
early friends. He seemed to feel deeply, and as there was
nothing to oppose, he assumed the style of the mild and
beautiful—he casually alluded to the days of his early
coming among his Southern friends—of hours of pleasure he
had massed, and of the hopes of the future. In a few moments
the bustle and confusion natural to a fatiguing day of
political wrangling ceased—one straggler after another
suspended his noisy demonstration, and gathered near the
speaker. Soon a mass of silent but heart-heaving humanity was
crowded compactly before him. Had Prentiss, on that occasion,
held the very heart-strings of his auditors in his hand, he
could not have had them more in his power. For an hour he
continued, rising from one important subject to another, until
the breath was fairly suspended in the excitement. An
uninterested spectator would have supposed that he had used
sorcery in thus transfixing his auditors. While all others
forgot, he noticed the day was drawing to a close, he turned
and looked toward the setting sun, and apostrophized its fading
glory—then in his most touching voice and manner,
concluded as follows:—

“Friends—That glorious orb reminds me that the day is
spent, and that I too must close. Ere we part, let me hope that
it may be our good fortune to end our days in the same
splendor, and that when the evening of life comes, we may sink
to rest with the clouds that close in on our departure,
gold-tipped with the glorious effulgence of a well-spent
life!”

In conclusion, I would ask, will some historian, who can
sympathize with the noble dead, gather up the now fleeting
memorials that still live in memory, and combine them together,
that future generations may know something of the mighty mind
of Prentiss.

The remains of the orator must ever be imperfect—the
tone of voice—the flashing eye—the occasion, and
the mighty shout of the multitude, cannot be impressed; but
still Prentiss has left enough in his brilliant career, if
treasured up, to show posterity that he was every inch a man.
Let his fragmentary printed speeches—let the
reminiscences of his friends that treat of his power as an
orator, be brought together, and unsatisfactory as they may be,
there will be found left intrinsic value enough to accomplish
the object. There will be in the fluted column, though
shattered and defaced, an Ionian beauty that will tell
unerringly of the magnificent temple that it once adorned.

BATON ROUGE, July 9, 1850.

[From Household Words.]

THE CHEMISTRY OF A CANDLE.

The Wilkinsons were having a small party,—it consisted
of themselves and Uncle Bagges—at which the younger
members of the family, home for the holidays, had been just
admitted to assist after dinner. Uncle Bagges was a gentleman
from whom his affectionate relatives cherished expectations of
a testamentary nature. Hence the greatest attention was paid by
them to the wishes of Mr. Bagges, as well as to every
observation which he might be pleased to make.

“Eh! what? you sir,” said Mr. Bagges, facetiously addressing
himself to his eldest nephew, Harry,—”Eh! what? I am glad
to hear, sir, that you are doing well at school. Now—eh?
now, are you clever enough to tell where was Moses when he put
the candle out?”

“That depends, uncle,” said the young gentleman, “on whether
he had lighted the candle to see with at night, or by daylight,
to seal a letter.”

“Eh! Very good, now! ‘Pon my word, very good,” exclaimed
Uncle Bagges. “You must be Lord Chancellor, sir—Lord
Chancellor, one of these days.”

“And now, uncle,” asked Harry, who was a favorite with his
uncle, “can you tell me what you do when you put a candle
out?”

“Clap an extinguisher on it, you young rogue, to be
sure.”

“Oh! but I mean, you cut off its supply of oxygen,” said
Master Harry.

“Cut off its ox’s—eh? what? I shall cut off your nose,
you young dog, one of these fine days.”

“He means something he heard at the Royal Institution,”
observed Mrs. Wilkinson. “He reads a great deal about
chemistry, and he attended Professor Faraday’s lectures there
[pg 293] on the chemical history of
a candle, and has been full of it ever since.”

“Now, you sir,” said Uncle Bagges, “come you here to me, and
tell me what you have to say about this chemical, eh?—or
comical: which?—this comical chemical history of a
candle.”

“He’ll bore you, Bagges,” said Mr. Wilkinson. “Harry, don’t
be troublesome to your uncle.”

“Troublesome! Oh, not at all. He amuses me. I like to hear
him. So let him teach his old uncle the comicality and
chemicality of a farthing rushlight.”

“A wax candle will be nicer and cleaner, uncle, and answer
the same purpose. There’s one on the mantel-shelf. Let me light
it.

“Take care you don’t burn your fingers, Or set anything on
fire,” said Mrs. Wilkinson.

“Now, uncle,” commenced Harry, having drawn his chair to the
side of Mr. Bagges, “we have got our candle burning. What do
you see?”

“Let me put on my spectacles,” answered the uncle.

“Look down on the top of the candle around the wick. See, it
is a little cup full of melted wax. The heat of the flame has
melted the wax just round the wick. The cold air keeps the
outside of it hard, so as to make the rim of it. The melted wax
in the little cup goes up through the wick to be burnt, just as
oil does in the wick of a lamp. What do you think makes it go
up, uncle?”

“Why—why, the flame draws it up, doesn’t it?”

“Not exactly, uncle. It goes up through little tiny passages
in the cotton wick, because very, very small channels, or
pipes, or pores, have the power in themselves of sucking up
liquids. What they do it by is called cap—something.”

“Capillary attraction, Harry,” suggested Mr. Wilkinson.

“Yes, that’s it; just as a sponge sucks up water, or a bit
of lump-sugar the little drop of tea or coffee left in the
bottom of a cup. But I mustn’t say much more about this, or
else you will tell me I am doing something very much like
teaching my grandmother to—you know what.”

“Your grandmother, eh, young sharp-shins?”

“No—I mean my uncle. Now, I’ll blow the candle out,
like Moses; not to be in the dark, though, but to see into what
it is. Look at the smoke rising from the wick. I’ll hold a bit
of lighted paper in the smoke, so as not to touch the wick. But
see, for all that, the candle lights again. So this shows that
the melted wax sucked up through the wick is turned into vapor;
and the vapor burns. The heat of the burning vapor keeps on
melting more wax, and that is sucked up too within the flame,
and turned into vapor, and burnt, and so on till the was is all
used up, and the candle is gone. So the flame, uncle, you see,
is the last of the candle, and the candle seems to go through
the flame into nothing—although it doesn’t, but goes into
several things, and isn’t it curious, as Professor Faraday
said, that the candle should look so splendid and glorious in
going away?”

“How well he remembers, doesn’t he?” observed Mrs.
Wilkinson.

“I dare say,” proceeded Harry, “that the flame of the candle
looks flat to you; but if we were to put a lamp glass over it,
so as to shelter it from the draught, you would see it is
round,—round sideways and running up to a peak. It is
drawn up by the hot air; you know that hot air always rises,
and that is the way smoke is taken up the chimney. What should
you think was in the middle of the flame?”

“I should say fire,” replied Uncle Bagges.

“Oh, no! The flame is hollow. The bright flame we see is
something no thicker than a thin peel, or skin; and it doesn’t
touch the wick. Inside of it is the vapor I told you of just
now. If you put one end of a bent pipe into the middle of the
flame, and let the other end of the pipe dip into a bottle, the
vapor or gas from the candle will mix with the air there; and
if you set fire to the mixture of gas from the candle and air
in the bottle, it would go off with a bang.”

“I wish you’d do that, Harry,” said Master Tom, the younger
brother of the juvenile lecturer.

“I want the proper things,” answered Harry. “Well, uncle,
the flame of the candle is a little shining case, with gas in
the inside of it, and air on the outside, so that the case of
flame is between the air and the gas. The gas keeps going into
the flame to burn, and when the candle burns properly, none of
it ever passes out through the flame; and none of the air ever
gets in through the flame to the gas. The greatest heat of the
candle is in this skin, or peel, or case of flame.”

“Case of flame!” repeated Mr. Bagges. “Live and learn. I
should have thought a candle-flame was as thick as my poor old
noddle.”

“I can show you the contrary,” said Harry. “I take this
piece of white paper, look, and hold it a second or two down
upon the candle-flame, keeping the flame very steady. Now I’ll
rub off the black of the smoke, and—there—you find
that the paper is scorched in the shape of a ring; but inside
the ring it is only dirtied, and not singed at all.”

“Seeing is believing,” remarked the uncle.

“But,” proceeded Harry, “there is more in the candle-flame
than the gas that comes out of the candle. You know a candle
won’t burn without air. There must be always air around the
gas, and touching it like, to make it burn. If a candle hasn’t
got enough air, it goes out, or burns badly, so that some of
the vapor inside of the flame comes out through it in the form
of smoke, and this is the reason of a candle smoking. So now
you know why a great clumsy dip smokes more than a neat wax
candle; it is because the
[pg 294] thick wick of the dip makes
too much fuel in proportion to the air that can get to
it.”

“Dear me! Well, I suppose there is a reason for everything,”
exclaimed the young philosopher’s mamma.

“What should you say now,” continued Harry, “if I told you
that the smoke that comes out of a candle is the very thing
that makes a candle light? Yes; a candle shines by consuming
its own smoke. The smoke of a candle is a cloud of small dust,
and the little grains of the dust are bits of charcoal, or
carbon, as chemists call it. They are made in the flame, and
burnt in the flame, and, while burning, make the flame bright.
They are burnt the moment they are made; but the flame goes on
making more of them as fast as it burns them: and that is how
it keeps bright. The place they are made in, is in the ease of
flame itself, where the strong heat is. The great heat
separates them from the gas which conies from the melted wax,
and, as soon as they touch the air on the outside of the thin
case of flame, they burn.”

“Can you tell how it is that the little bits of carbon came
the brightness of the flame?” asked Mr. Wilkinson.

“Because they are pieces of solid matter,” answered Harry.
“To make a flame shine, there must always be some
solid—or at least liquid-matter in it.”

“Very good.” said Mr. Bagges,—”solid stuff necessary
to brightness.”

“Some gases and other things,” resumed Harry, “that burn
with a flame you can hardly see, burn splendidly when something
solid is put into them. Oxygen and hydrogen—tell me if I
use too hard words, uncle—oxygen and hydrogen gases, if
mixed together and blown through a pipe, burn with plenty of
heat but with very little light. But if their flame is blown
upon a piece of quick-lime, it gets so bright as to be quite
dazzling, Make the smoke of oil of turpentine pass through the
same flame, and it gives the flame a beautiful brightness
directly.”

“I wonder,” observed Uncle Bagges, “what has made you such a
bright youth.”

“Taking after uncle, perhaps,” retorted his nephew. “Don’t
put my candle and me out. Well, carbon, or charcoal is what
causes the brightness of all lamps, and candles, and other
common lights; so, of course, there is carbon in what they are
all made of.”

“So carbon is smoke, eh? and light is owing to your carbon.
Giving light out of smoke, eh? as they say in the classics,”
observed Mr. Bagges.

“But what becomes of the candle,” pursued Harry, “as it
burns away? where does it go?”

“Nowhere,” said his mamma, “I should think. It burns to
nothing.”

“Oh, dear, no!” said Harry, “everything—everybody goes
somewhere.”

“Eh!—rather an important consideration, that,” Mr.
Bagges moralized.

“You can see it goes into smoke, which makes soot, for one
thing,” pursued Harry. “There are other things it goes into,
not to be seen by only looking, but you can get to see them by
taking the right means,—just put your hand over the
candle, uncle.”

“Thank you, young gentleman, I had rather be excused.”

“Not close enough down to burn you, uncle; higher up.
There—you feel a stream of hot air; so something seems to
rise from the candle. Suppose you were to put a very long
slender gas-burner over the flame, and let the flame burn just
within the end of it, as if it were a chimney,—some of
the hot steam would go up and come out at the top, but a sort
of dew would be left behind in the glass chimney, if the
chimney was cold enough when you put it on. There are ways of
collecting this sort of dew, and when it is collected it turns
out to be really water. I am not joking, uncle. Water is one of
the things which the candle turns into in burning,—water
coming out of fire. A jet of oil gives above a pint of water in
burning. In some lighthouses they burn, Professor Faraday says,
up to two gallons of oil in a night, and if the windows are
cold the steam from the oil clouds the inside of the windows,
and, in frosty weather, freezes into ice.”

“Water out of a candle, eh?” exclaimed Mr. Bagges. “As hard
to get, I should have thought, as blood out of a post. Where
does it come from?”

“Part from the wax, and part from the air, and yet not a
drop of it comes either from the air or the wax. What do you
make of that, uncle?”

“Eh? Oh! I’m no hand at riddles. Give it up.”

“No riddle at all, uncle. The part that comes from the wax
isn’t water, and the part that comes from the air isn’t water,
but when put together they become water. Water is a mixture of
two things then. This can be shown. Put some iron wire or
turnings into a gun barrel open at both ends. Heat the middle
of the barrel red-hot in a little furnace. Keep the heat up,
and send the steam of boiling water through the red-hot gun
barrel. What will come out at the other end of the barrel won’t
be steam; it will be gas, which doesn’t turn to water again
when it gets cold, and which burns if you put a light to it.
Take the turnings out of the gun-barrel, and you will find them
changed to rust, and heavier than when they were put in. Part
of the water is the gas that comes out of the barrel, the other
part is what mixes with the iron turnings, and changes them to
rust, and makes them heavier. You can fill a Wadder with the
gas that comes out of the gun-barrel, or you can pass bubbles
of it up into a jar of water turned upside down in a trough,
and, as I said, you can make this part of the water burn.”

“Eh?” cried Mr. Bagges. “Upon my word! One of these day, we
shall have you setting the Thames on
fire.”

“Nothing more easy,” said Harry, “than to burn part of the
Thames, or of any other water; I mean the gas that I have just
told you about, which is called hydrogen. In burning, hydrogen
produces water again, like the flame of a candle. Indeed,
hydrogen is that part of the water formed by a candle burning,
that comes from the wax. All things that have hydrogen in them
produce water in burning, and the more there is in them the
more they produce. When pure hydrogen burns, nothing comes from
it but water, no smoke or soot at all. If you were to burn one
ounce of it, the water you would get would be just nine ounces.
There are many ways of making hydrogen besides out of steam by
the hot gun-barrel. I could show it you in a moment by pouring
a little sulphuric acid mixed with water into a bottle upon a
few zinc or steel filings, and putting a cork in the bottle
with a little pipe through it, and setting fire to the gas that
would come from the mouth of the pipe. We should find the flame
very hot, but having scarcely any brightness. I should like you
to see the curious qualities of hydrogen, particularly how
light it is, so as to carry things up in the air; and I wish I
had a small balloon to fill with it, and make go up to the
ceiling, or a bag-pipe full of it to blow soap-bubbles with,
and show how much faster they rise than common ones, blown with
the breath.”

“So do I,” interposed Master Tom.

“And so,” resumed Harry, “hydrogen, you know, uncle, is part
of water, and just one-ninth part.”

“As hydrogen is to water, so is a tailor to an ordinary
individual, eh?” Mr. Bagges remarked.

“Well, now then, uncle, if hydrogen is the tailor’s part of
the water, what are the other eight parts? The iron turnings
used to make hydrogen in the gun-barrel, and rusted, take just
those eight parts from the water in the shape of steam, and are
so much the heavier. Burn iron turnings in the air, and they
make the same rust, and gain just the same in weight. So the
other eight parts must be found in the air for one thing, and
in the rusted iron turnings for another, and they must also be
in the water; and now the question is, how to get at them?”

“Out of the water? Fish for them, I should say,” suggested
Mr. Bagges.

“Why, so we can,” said Harry. “Only, instead of hooks and
lines, we must use wires—two wires, one from one end, the
other from the other, of a galvanic battery. Put the points of
these wires into water, a little distance apart, and they
instantly take the water to pieces. If they are of copper, or a
metal that will rust easily, one of them begins to rust, and
air-bubbles come up from the other. These bubbles are hydrogen.
The other part of the water mixes with the end of the wire and
makes rust. But if the wires are of gold, or a metal that does
not rust easily, air-bubbles rise from the ends of both wires.
Collect the bubbles from both wires in a tube, and fire them,
and they turn to water again; and this water is exactly the
same weight as the quantity that has been changed into the two
gases. Now then, uncle, what should you think water was
composed of?”

“Eh? well—I suppose of those very identical two gases,
young gentleman.”

“Right, uncle. Recollect that the gas from one of the wires
was hydrogen, the one-ninth of water. What should you guess the
gas from the other wire to be?”

“Stop—eh?—wait a bit—eh?—oh! why,
the other eight-ninths, to be sure.”

“Good again, uncle. Now this gas that is eight-ninths of
water is the gas called oxygen that I mentioned just now. This
is a very curious gas. It won’t burn in air at all itself, like
gas from a lamp, but it has a wonderful power of making things
burn that are lighted and put into it. If you fill a jar with
it—”

“How do you manage that?” Mr. Bagges inquired.

“You fill the jar with water,” answered Harry, “and you
stand it upside down in a vessel full of water too. Then you
let bubbles of the gas up into the jar, and they turn out the
water and take its place. Put a stopper in the neck of the jar,
or hold a glass plate against the mouth of it, and you can take
it out of the water and so have bottled oxygen. A lighted
candle put into a jar of oxygen blazes up directly, and is
consumed before you can say Jack Robinson. Charcoal burns away
in it as fast, with beautiful bright sparks—phosphorus
with a light that dazzles you to look at—and a piece of
iron or steel just made red-hot at the end first, is burnt in
oxygen quicker than a stick would be in common air. The
experiment of burning things in oxygen beats any
fire-works.”

“Oh, how jolly!” exclaimed Tom.

“Now we see, uncle,” Harry continued, “that water is
hydrogen and oxygen united together, that water is got wherever
hydrogen is burnt in common air, that a candle won’t burn
without air, and that when a candle burns there is hydrogen in
it burning, and forming water. Now, then, where does the
hydrogen of the candle get the oxygen from, to turn into water
with it?”

“From the air, eh?”

“Just so. I can’t stop to tell you of the other things which
there is oxygen in, and the many beautiful and amusing ways of
getting it. But as there is oxygen in the air, and as oxygen
makes things burn at such a rate, perhaps you wonder why air
does not make things burn as fast as oxygen. The reason is,
that there is something else in the air that mixes with the
oxygen and weakens it.”

“Makes a sort of gaseous grog of it, eh?” said Mr. Bagges.
“But how is that proved?”

“Why, there is a gas, called nitrous gas, which, if you mix
it with oxygen, takes all the oxygen into itself, and the
mixture of the [pg 296] nitrous gas and oxygen, if
you put water with it, goes into the water. Mix nitrous gas
and air together in a jar over water, and the nitrous gas
takes away the oxygen, and then the water sucks up the mixed
oxygen and nitrous gas, and that part of the air which
weakens the oxygen is left behind. Burning phosphorus in
confined air will also take all the oxygen from it, and
there are other ways of doing the same thing. The portion of
the air left behind is called nitrogen. You wouldn’t know it
from common air by the look; it has no color, taste, nor
smell, and it won’t burn. But things won’t burn in it,
either; and anything on fire put into it goes out directly.
It isn’t fit to breathe, and a mouse, or any animal, shut up
in it, dies. It isn’t poisonous, though; creatures only die
in it for want of oxygen. We breathe it with oxygen, and
then it does no harm, but good: for if we breathed pure
oxygen, we should breathe away so violently, that we should
soon breathe our life out. In the same way, if the air were
nothing but oxygen, a candle would not last above a
minute.

“What a tallow-chandler’s bill we should have!” remarked
Mrs. Wilkinson.

“‘If a house were on fire in oxygen,’ as Professor Faraday
said, ‘every iron bar, or rafter, or pillar, every nail and
iron tool, and the fire-place itself; all the zinc and copper
roofs, and leaden coverings, and gutters, and pipes, would
consume and burn, increasing the combustion.'”

“That would be, indeed, burning ‘like a house on fire,'”
observed Mr. Bagges.

“‘Think,'” said Harry, continuing his quotation, “‘of the
Houses of Parliament, or a steam-engine manufactory. Think of
an iron proof-chest no proof against oxygen. Think of a
locomotive and its train,—every engine, every carriage,
and even every rail would be set on fire and burnt up.’ So now,
uncle, I think you see what the use of nitrogen is, and
especially how it prevents a candle from burning out too
fast.”

“Eh?” said Mr. Bagges. “Well, I will say I do think we are
under considerable obligations to nitrogen.”

“I have explained to you, uncle,” pursued Harry, “how a
candle, in burning, turns into water. But it turns into
something else. besides that. There is a stream of hot air
going up from it that won’t condense into dew; some of that is
the nitrogen of the air which the candle has taken all the
oxygen from. But there is more in it than nitrogen. Hold a long
glass tube over a candle, so that the stream of hot air from it
may go up through the tube. Hold a jar over the end of the tube
to collect some of the stream of hot air. Put some lime-water,
which looks quite clear, into the jar; stop the jar, and shake
it up. The lime-water, which was quite clear before, turns
milky. Then there is something made by the burning of the
candle that changes the color of the lime-water. That is a gas,
too, and you can collect it, and examine it. It is to be got
from several things, and is a part of all chalk, marble, and
the shells of eggs or of shell-fish. The easiest way to make it
is by pouring muriatic or sulphuric acid on chalk or marble.
The marble or chalk begins to hiss or bubble, and you can
collect the bubbles in the same way that you can oxygen. The
gas made by the candle in burning, and which also is got out of
the chalk and marble, is called carbonic acid. It puts out a
light in a moment; it kills any animal that breathes it, and it
is really poisonous to breathe, because it destroys life even
when mixed with a pretty large quantity of common air. The
bubbles made by beer when it ferments, are carbonic acid, so is
the air that fizzes out of soda-water, and it is good to
swallow though it is deadly to breathe. It is got from chalk by
burning the chalk as well as by putting acid to it, and burning
the carbonic acid out of chalk makes the chalk lime. This is
why people are killed sometimes by getting in the way of the
wind that blows from lime-kilns.”

“Of which it is advisable carefully to keep to the
windward.” Mr. Wilkinson observed.

“The most curious thing about carbonic acid gas,” proceeded
Harry, “is its weight. Although it is only a sort of air, it is
so heavy that you can pour it from one vessel into another. You
may dip a cup of it and pour it down upon a candle, and it will
put the candle out, which would astonish an ignorant person;
because carbonic acid gas is as invisible as the air, and the
candle seems to be put out by nothing. A soap-bubble or common
air floats on it like wood on water. Its weight is what makes
it collect in brewers’ vats; and also in wells, where it is
produced naturally; and owing to its collecting in such places
it causes the deaths we so often hear about of those who go
down into them without proper care. It is found in many springs
of water, more or less; and a great deal of it comes out of the
earth in some places. Carbonic acid gas is what stupefies the
dogs in the Grotto del Cane. Well, but how is carbonic acid gas
made by the candle?”

“I hope with your candle you’ll throw some light upon the
subject,” said Uncle Bagges.

“I hope so,” answered Harry. “Recollect it is the burning of
the smoke, or soot, or carbon of the candle, that makes the
candle-flame bright. Also that the candle won’t burn without
air. Likewise that it will not burn in nitrogen, or air that
has been deprived of oxygen. So the carbon of the candle
mingles with oxygen, in burning, to make carbonic acid gas;
just as the hydrogen does to form water. Carbonic acid gas,
then, is carbon or charcoal dissolved in oxygen. Here is black
soot getting invisible and changing into air; and this seems
strange, uncle, doesn’t it?”

“Ahem! Strange, if true,” answered Mr. Bagges. “Eh? Well! I
suppose it’s all right.”

“Quite so, uncle. Burn carbon or charcoal either in the air
or in oxygen, and it is sure always to make carbonic acid, and
nothing [pg 297] else, if it is dry. No dew
or mist gathers in a cold glass jar if you burn dry charcoal
in it. The charcoal goes entirely into carbonic acid gas,
and leaves nothing behind but ashes, which are only earthy
stuff that was in the charcoal, but not part of the charcoal
itself. And now, shall I tell you something about
carbon?”

“With all my heart,” assented Mr. Bagges.

“I said that there was carbon or charcoal in all common
lights, so there is in every common kind of fuel. If you heat
coal or wood away from the air, some gas comes away, and leaves
behind coke from coal, and charcoal from wood; both carbon,
though not pure. Heat carbon as much as you will in a close
vessel, and it does not change in the least; but let the air
get to it, and then it burns and flies off in carbonic acid
gas. This makes carbon so convenient for fuel. But it is
ornamental as well as useful, uncle. The diamond is nothing
else than carbon.”

“The diamond, eh! You mean the black diamond.”

“No: the diamond, really and truly. The diamond is only
carbon in the shape of a crystal.”

“Eh? and can’t some of your clever chemists crystalize a
little bit of carbon, and make a Koh-i-noor?”

“Ah, uncle, perhaps we shall, some day. In the mean time I
suppose we must be content with making carbon so brilliant as
it is in the flame of a candle. Well; now you see that a
candle-flame is vapor burning, and the vapor, in burning, turns
into water and carbonic acid gas. The oxygen of both the
carbonic acid gas and the water comes from the air, and the
hydrogen and carbon together are the vapor. They are distilled
out of the melted was by the heat. But, you know, carbon alone
can’t be distilled by any heat. It can be distilled, though,
when it is joined with hydrogen, as it is in the wax, and then
the mixed hydrogen and carbon rise in gas of the same kind as
the gas in the streets, and that also is distilled by heat from
coal. So a candle is a little gas manufactory in itself, that
burns the gas as fast as it makes it.”

“Haven’t you pretty nearly come to your candle’s end’!” said
Mr. Wilkinson.

“Nearly. I only want to tell uncle, that the burning of a
candle is almost exactly like our breathing. Breathing is
consuming oxygen, only not so fast as burning. In breathing we
throw out water in vapor and carbonic acid from our lungs, and
take oxygen in. Oxygen is as necessary to support the life of
the body, as it is to keep up the flame of a candle.”

“So,” said Mr. Bagges, “man is a candle, eh? and Shakspeare
knew that, I suppose, (as he did most things,) when he
wrote

“Well, well; we old ones are moulds, and you young squires
are dips and rushlights, eh? Any more to tell us about the
candle?”

“I could tell you a great deal more about oxygen, and
hydrogen, and carbon, and water, and breathing, that Professor
Faraday said, if I had time; but you should go and hear him
yourself, uncle.”

“Eh? well! I think I will. Some of us seniors may learn
something from a juvenile lecture, at any rate, if given by a
Faraday. And now, my boy. I will tell you what,” added Mr.
Bagges, “I am very glad to find you so fond of study and
science; and you deserve to be encouraged: and so I’ll give you
a what-d’ye-call-it’?—a Galvanic Battery, on your next
birth-day; and so much for your teaching your old uncle the
chemistry of a candle.”

[From a Review of Griswold’s Prose Writers of
America, in the Southern Literary Messenger.]

DANIEL WEBSTER,

AS A STATESMAN, AND AS A MAN OF LETTERS.

Mr. Webster is properly selected as the representative of
the best sense, and highest wisdom, and most consummate
dignity, of the politics and oratory of the present times,
because his great intelligence has continued to be so finely
sensitive to all the influences that stir the action and
speculation of the country.

With elements of reason, definite, absolute, and emphatic;
with principles settled, strenuous, deep and unchangeable as
his being; his wisdom is yet exquisitely practical: with
subtlest sagacity it apprehends every change in the
circumstances in which it is to act, and can accommodate its
action without loss of vigor, or alteration of its general
purpose. Its theories always “lean and hearken” to the actual.
By a sympathy of the mind, almost transcendental in its
delicacy, its speculations are attracted into a parallelism
with the logic of life and nature. In most men, that
intellectual susceptibility by which they are capable of being
reacted upon by the outer world, and having their principles
and views expanded, modified or quickened, does not outlast the
first period of life; from that time they remain fixed and
rigid in their policy, temper and characteristics; if a new
phase of society is developed, it must find its exponent in
other men. But in Webster this fresh suggestive sensibility of
the judgment has been carried on into the matured and
determined wisdom of manhood. His perceptions, feelings,
reasonings, tone, are always up to the level of the hour, or in
advance of it; sometimes far, very far in advance, as in the
views thrown out in his speech at Baltimore, on an
international commercial system, in which he showed that he
then foresaw both the fate of the tariff and the fallacy of
free-trade. No man has ever been able to say, or now can say,
that he is before Webster. The youngest men in the nation look
to him, not as representing the past, but as leading in the
future.

This practicalness and readiness of adaptation are
instinctive, not voluntary and designed. They are united with
the most decided preference for certain opinions and the most
earnest averseness to others. Nothing
[pg 298] can be less like
Talleyrand’s system of waiting for events. He has never, in
view of a change which he saw to be inevitable, held himself
in reserve and uncommitted. What Webster is at any time,
that he is strenuously, entirely, openly. He has first
opposed, with every energy of his mind and temper, that
which, when it has actually come, he is ready to accept, and
make the best of. He never surrenders in advance a position
which knows will be carried; he takes his place, and
delivers battle; he fights as one who is fighting the last
battle of his country’s hopes; he fires the last shot. When
the smoke and tumult are cleared off, where is Webster! Look
around for the nearest rallying point which the view
presents; there he stands, with his hand upon his heart, in
grim composure; calm, dignified, resolute; neither
disheartened nor surprised by defeat. “Leaving the things
that are behind,” is now the trumpet-sound by which he
rallies his friends to a new confidence, and stimulates them
to fresh efforts. It is obvious that Webster, when
contending with all his force for or against some particular
measure, has not been contemplating the probability of being
compelled to oppose or defend a different policy, and, so,
choosing his words warily, in reference to future
possibilities of a personal kind: yet when the time has come
that he has been obliged to fight with his face in another
direction, it has always been found that no one principle
had been asserted, no one sentiment displayed, incompatible
with his new positions. This union of consistency with
practicability has arisen naturally from the extent and
comprehensiveness of his views, from the breadth and
generality with which the analytical power of his
understanding has always led him to state his principles and
define his position. From the particular scheme or special
maxim which his party was insisting upon, his mind rose to a
higher and more general formula of truth.

Owing to the same superior penetration and reach of thought,
the gloom of successive repulses has never been able to
paralyze the power which it has saddened. The constitution has
been so often invaded and trampled upon, that to a common eye
it might well seem to have lost all the resentments of
vitality. But Webster has distinguished between the
constitution and its administration. He has seen that the
constitution, though in bondage, is not killed; that the
channels of its life-giving wisdom are stuffed up with rubbish,
but not obliterated. He has been determined that if the rulers
of the country will deny the truth, they shall not debauch it;
if they depart from the constitution, they shall not deprave
it. He has been resolved, that when this tyranny of corruption
shall be overpast, and the constitution draws again its own
free breath of virtue, truth and wisdom, it shall be found
perfect of limb and feature, prepared to rise like a giant
refreshed by sleep.

Mr. Griswold, we suppose, is quite right in suggesting that
the only name in modern times to which reference can with any
fitness be made for purposes of analogy or comparison with
Webster is that of Burke. In many respects there is a
correspondence between their characters; in some others they
differ widely. As a prophet of the truth of political morals,
as a revealer of those essential elements in the constitution
of life, upon which, or of which, society is constructed and
government evolved, Burke had no peer. In that department he
rises into the distance and grandeur of inspiration; nil
mortote sonans. Nor do we doubt that the Providence of God
had raised him up for the purposes of public safety and
guidance, any more than we doubt the mission of Jeremiah or
Elisha, or any other of the school of the Lord’s prophets. But
leaving Burke unapproached in this region of the nature and
philosophy of government, and looking at him, in his general
career, as a man of intellect and action, we might indicate an
analogy of this kind, that the character, temper and reason of
Burke seem to be almost an image of the English constitution,
and Webster’s of the American. To get the key to Burke’s
somewhat irregular and startling career, it is necessary, to
study the idea of the old whig constitution of the English
monarchy: viewing his course from that point of view, we
comprehend his almost countenancing and encouraging rebellion
in the case of the American colonies; his intense hostility to
Warren Hastings’ imperial system; his unchastised earnestness
in opposition to French maxims in the decline of his life. The
constitution of the United States, that most wonderful of the
emanations of providential wisdom, seems to be not only the
home of Webster’s affections and seat of his proudest hopes,
but the very type of his understanding and fountain of his
intellectual strength:

The genius of Burke, like the one, was inexhaustible in
resources, so composite and so averse from theory as to appear
incongruous, but justified in the result; not formal, not
always entirely perspicuous. Webster’s mind, like the other, is
eminently logical, reduced into principles, orderly, distinct,
reconciling abstraction with convenience, various in
manifestation, yet pervaded by an unity of character.

Mr. Webster has not merely illustrated a great range of
mental powers and accomplishments, but has filled, in the eye
of the nation, on a great scale, and to the farthest reach of
their exigency, a diversity of intellectual characters; while
the manner in which Burke’s wisdom displayed itself was usually
the same. We cannot suppose that Burke could have been a great
lawyer. Webster possesses a consummate legal judgment and
prodigious powers of legal logic, and is felt to be the highest
authority on a great question of law in this country. The
[pg 299] demonstrative faculty; the
capacity to analyze and open any proposition so as to
identify its separate elements with the very consciousness
of the reader’s or hearer’s mind; this, which is the
lawyer’s peculiar power, had not been particularly developed
in Burke, but exists in Webster in greater expansion and
force than in any one since Doctor Johnson, who, it always
appeared to us, had he been educated for the bar, would have
made the greatest lawyer that ever led the decisions of
Westminster-Hall. We should hardly be justified in saying
that Burke would have made a great First Lord of the
Treasury. Mr. Webster, as Secretary of State, proved himself
to be a practical statesman of the highest; finest,
promptest sagacity and foresight that this or any nation
ever witnessed. Who now doubts the surpassing wisdom, who
now but reverences the exalted patriotism, of the advice and
the example which he gave, but gave in vain, to the Whig
party at the beginning of Mr. Tyler’s administration? His
official correspondence would be lowered by a comparison
with any state papers since the secretaryship of John
Marshall. Does the public generally know what has become of
that portentous difficulty about the Right of Search, upon
which England and America, five years ago, were on the point
of being “lento collisæ duello.” Mr. Webster settled
it by mere force of mind: he dissipated the Question, by
seeing through it, and by compelling others to see a
fallacy in its terms which before had imposed upon the
understanding of two nations. In the essential and universal
philosophy of politics, Webster is second only to Burke.
After Burke, there is no statesman whose writings might be
read with greater advantage by foreign nations, or would
have been studied with so much respect by antiquity, as
Webster’s.

In a merely literary point of view, this perhaps may be said
of Mr. Webster, that he is the only powerful and fervid orator,
since the glorious days of Greece, whose style is so
disciplined that any of his great public harangues might be
used as models of composition. His language is beautifully
pure, and his combinations of it exhibit more knowledge of the
genius, spirit, and classic vigor of the English tongue, than
it has entered the mind of any professor of rhetoric to
apprehend. As the most impetuous sweeps of passion in him are
pervaded and informed and guided by intellect, so the most
earnest struggles of intellect seem to be calmed and made
gentle in their vehemence, by a more essential rationality of
taste. That imperious mind, which seems fit to defy the
universe, is ever subordinate, by a kind of fascination, to the
perfect law of grace. In the highest of his intellectual
flights—and who can follow the winged rush of that eagle
mind?—in the widest of his mental ranges-and who shall
measure their extent?—he is ever moving within the
severest line of beauty. No one would think of saying that Mr.
Webster’s speeches are thrown off with ease, and cost him but
little effort; they are clearly the result of the intensest
stress of mental energy; yet the manner is never discomposed;
the decency and propriety of the display never interfered with;
he is always greater than his genius; you see “the depth out
not the tumult” of the mind. Whether, with extended arm, he
strangles the “reluctantes dracones” of democracy, or with
every faculty called home, concentrates the light and heat of
his being in developing into principles those great sentiments
and great instincts which are his inspiration; in all, the
orator stands forth with the majesty and chastened grace of
Pericles himself. In the fiercest of encounters with the
deadliest of foes, the mind, which is enraged, is never
perturbed; the style, which leaps like the fire of heaven, is
never disordered. As in Guido’s picture of St. Michael piercing
the dragon, while the gnarled muscles of the arms and hands
attest the utmost strain of the strength, the countenance
remains placid, serene, and undisturbed. In this great quality
of mental dignity, Mr. Webster’s speeches have become more and
more eminent. The glow and luster which set his earlier
speeches a-blaze with splendor, is in his later discourses
rarely let forth; but they have gained more, in the increase of
dignity, than they have parted with in the diminution of
brilliancy. We regard his speech before the shop-keepers,
calling themselves merchants, of Philadelphia, as one of the
most weighty and admirable of the intellectual efforts of his
life. The range of profound and piercing wisdom; the exquisite
and faultless taste; but above all, the august and indefectible
dignity, that are illustrated from the beginning to the end of
that great display of matured and finished strength, leave us
in mingled wonder and reverence. There is one sentence there
which seems to us almost to reach the intellectual
sublime; and while it stirs within us the depths of sympathy
and admiration, we could heartily wish that the young men of
America would inhale the almost supra-mortal spirit which it
breathes: “I would not with any idolatrous admiration regard
the Constitution of the United States, nor any other work of
man; but this side of idolatry, I hold it in profound respect.
I believe that no human working on such a subject, no human
ability exerted for such an end, has ever produced so much
happiness, or holds out now to so many millions of people the
prospect, through such a succession of ages and ages, of so
much happiness, as the Constitution of the United States. We
who are here for one generation, for a single life, and yet in
our several stations and relations in society intrusted in some
degree with its protection and support, what duty does it
devolve, what duty does it not devolve, upon us!” In the
name of distant ages, and a remote posterity, we hail the
author of this and similar orations, as Webster the
Olympian.

But we leave a subject which we have incidentally touched,
sincerely disclaiming any attempt to estimate the character or
define the greatness of Webster. In reference to him we feel,
as Cicero said to Cæsar, “Nil vulgare te dignum videri
possit.“

[From the Athenæum.]

THE NEW PROPHET IN THE EAST.⁵

The vicissitudes of the war in the Caucasus of late have
been surprising enough to awaken the interest of Western
Europe, even amidst her own nearer anxieties. Last year it was
said that the conquest of Achulgo, the stronghold of the
redoubtable Schamyl, had effectually broken the power of that
daring leader. In direct contradiction to such reports, later
accounts from Daghestan tell of the reappearance of the notable
partisan amidst the lines of the Russians, and of a defeat of
the latter, the most severe, if the details of the event be
true, that they have yet suffered in the Caucasus. In any case,
these exciting changes of fortune would be in favor of a book
professing to describe this interesting region, and to add to
our knowledge of its brave inhabitants. The main interest of
Herr Bodenstedt’s work will now be enhanced by its undertaking
to give a more precise account than had previously appeared of
the priest-warrior of Daghestan. and of the new sect as the
prophet of which he succeeded in arraying the independent
mountain clans against their common enemy with a kind of
combination unknown in earlier periods of the struggle.

The author has evidently lived for some time in the region
which he describes, or in the bordering districts along the
Caspian, both in Georgia and in North Daghestan, His
acquaintance with Asiatic and Russian languages and customs
appears to have been gained both by study and from intercourse
with the natives of the south-eastern frontier. He is not
ignorant of Oriental writings that refer to his subject; and
his Russian statistics prove an access to official authorities
which are not to be found in print. These, however obtained,
can scarcely have been imparted to him as one of those writers
whom the Court of St. Petersburg hires to promote its views
through the press of Western Europe. His sympathies are
declared against Russian usurpation; and the tendency of his
essay is to prove how little real progress it has yet made in
subduing the Caucasus, the enormous waste of money and life
with which its fluctuating successes have been bought, and the
fallacy of expecting a better result hereafter.

What it has cost in life on the Russian side to
attack-hitherto with no lasting effect—the handful of
Caucasian mountaineers, may be guessed from a single note,
dated 1847: “The present Russian force in the
Caucasus”—including of course, the armed Cossacks of the
Kuban and Terek—”amounts to two hundred thousand.” Taking
into account the numbers yearly cut off by disease, more fatal
even than the mountain war, every step of which must be won by
the most reckless waste of life,—the “Russian Officer”
may perhaps truly affirm that the annual expenditure of
life by Russia, in her warfare with Schamyl, has for many years
past exceeded the whole number of the population at any one
time directly under the rule of that chieftain.

We have said that the most instructive part of Herr
Bodenstedt’s essay is his sketch of that politico-religious
scheme which made Schamyl formidable to the Russians. This
system, it is to be observed, arose and has since been fully
developed only in the Eastern Caucasus, where of late the main
stress of the war has been. The western tribes (our
“Circassians”) who took the lead at an earlier stage of the
contest, were not then, nor have they since been, inspired by
the fanatic zeal which united the tribes of Daghestan. They
fought from a mere love of independence, each little republic
by itself; and their efforts, however heroic, being without
concert, gradually declined before the vast force of the
invader. In the region looking westward from the Georgian
frontier on the Euxine, on the one side of the Caucasian range,
and along the lower Kuban on the other, the Russian posts are
now seldom threatened but by small predatory bands; the
natives, retired to their mountain villages, have for some time
made but few more formidable incursions. The war is transferred
to the region spreading eastward from the Elbrus to the
Caspian; where the strife for free existence is animated not
less by the hatred of Russian slavery than by a fresh outbreak
of Mohammedan zeal against infidel invasion,—a revival,
in fact, of that war-like fanaticism which made the Moslem name
terrible from the eighth to the sixteenth century.

It dates from the years 1823-4; at which period a “new
doctrine” began to be preached, secretly at first, to the
select Uléma, afterward to greater numbers, in word and
writing, by one Mullah Mohammed, a famous teacher and a judge
(or kadi) of Jarach, in the Kurin district of Daghestan.
He professed to have learnt it from Hadis-Ismail, an Alim of
Kurdomir, highly famed for wisdom and sanctity. It laid bare
the degradation into which his countrymen had sunk by
irreligion and by the jealousy of sect; their danger, in
consequence, from enemies of the true faith; and urged the
necessity of reform in creed and practice, in order to regain
the invincible character promised by the Prophet to believers.
The theoretical part of the reformed doctrine seems to be a
kind of Sufism,—the general character of which mode of
Islam, long prevalent in the adjacent kingdom of Persia, has
been described [pg 301] by our own orientalists.
Disputed questions as to its origin, whether in Brahmin
philosophy or in the reveries of Moslem mystics, cannot be
discussed here; it must suffice to indicate those points
which appear to connect it with the hieratic policy that has
given a new aspect to the war in the Caucasus.

Proceeding nominally on the basis of the Koran, it
inculcates or expounds a kind of spiritual transcendentalism;
in which the adept is raised above the necessity of formal
laws, which are only requisite for those who are not capable of
rising to a full intelligence of the supreme power. To gain
this height, by devout contemplation, must be the personal work
and endeavor of each individual. The revelation of divine
truth, once attained, supersedes specific moral injunctions;
ceremonies and systems, even, of religion, become indifferent
to the mind illuminated by the sacred idea. A higher degree is
the perfect conception or ecstatic vision of the
Deity;—the highest-reserved only for the prophetic
few—a real immediate union with his essence. Here, it
will be seen, are four steps or stages, each of which has its
sacred manual or appropriate system of teaching. In the
hieratic system, of which Schamyl is the head, the divisions
seem to correspond pretty nearly with this arrangement, as
follows:—

The first includes the mass of the armed people;
whose zeal it promotes by strict religious and moral
injunctions enjoining purity of life, exact regard to the
ritual of the Koran, teaching pilgrimages, fasting, ablutions;
the duty of implacable war against the Infidel, the sin of
enduring his tyranny.

The second is composed of those, who, in virtue of
striving upward to a higher Divine intelligence, are elevated
above ceremonial religion. Of these the Murids
(seekers or strugglers,) are formed: a body of
religious warriors attached to the Imam, whose courage in
battle, raised to a kind of frenzy, despises numbers and laughs
at death. To accept quarter, or to fly from the Infidel, is
forbidden to this class.

The third includes the more perfect acolytes, who are
presumed to have risen to the ecstatic view of the Deity. These
are the elect, whom the Imam makes Naibs or
vice-regents,—invested with nearly absolute power in his
absence.

The fourth, or highest, implying entire union with
the Divine essence, is held by Schamyl alone. In virtue of this
elevation and spiritual endowment, the Imam, as an immediate
organ of the Supreme Will, is himself the source of all law to
his followers, unerring, impeccable; to question or disobey his
behests is a sin against religion, as well as a political
crime. It may be seen what advantage this system must have
given to Schamyl in his conflict with the Russians. The
doctrine of the indifference of sects and forms enabled him to
unite the divided followers of Omar and of Ali, in a region
where both abound, and where the schism had formerly been one
of the most effectual instruments of the enemy. The belief in a
Divine mission and spiritual powers sustains his adherents in
all reverses; while it invites to defection from the Russian
side those of the Mohammedan tribes who have submitted to the
invader. Among these, however, Schamyl, like his predecessors
in the same priestly office, by no means confides the progress
of his sect to spiritual influences only. The work of
conversion, where exhortation fails, is carried on
remorselessly by fire and sword; and the Imam is as terrible to
those of his countrymen whom fear or interest retains in
alliance with Russia, as to the soldiers of the Czar. With a
character in which extreme daring is allied with coolness,
cunning, and military genius, with a good fortune which has
hitherto preserved his life in many circumstances where escape
seemed impossible,—it may be seen that the belief in his
supernatural gifts and privileges, once created, must always
tend to increase in intensity and effect among the imaginative
and credulous Mohammedans of the Caucasus; and that this apt
combination of the warrior with the politician and prophet
accounts for his success in combining against the Russians a
force of the once discordant tribes of Daghestan, possessing
more of the character of a national resistance than had been
ever known before in the Caucasus,—and compelling the
invaders to purchase every one of their few, trifling, and
dubious advances by the terrible sacrifice of life already
noticed.

In this formidable movement the highlander’s natural freedom
is fanned into a blaze by a religious zeal like that which once
led the armies of Islam over one half of Asia and Europe.
Although it reached its highest energy and a more consummate
development under Schamyl, it was begun by his predecessors. Of
the Mullah Mohammed, who first preached the duty of casting off
the yoke of the Giaour, and the necessity of a religious reform
and union of rival sects, as a means to that end, we have
already spoken. This founder of the new system, an aged man,
untrained in arms, never himself drew the sword in the cause;
but was active in diffusing its principles and preparing a
warlike rising by exhortations and letters circulated through
all Daghestan. Suspected of these designs, he was seized, in
1826, by the orders of Jermoloff; and although be
escaped,—by the connivance, it is said, of the native
prince employed to capture him,—he afterward lived, in a
kind of concealment, for some years. The post of Imam was
thereupon assumed by a priest who was able to fight for the new
doctrine as well as to preach it. The first armed outbreak took
place under Kasi-Mullah, about the year 1829; from which time,
until his death in a battle at Himry, in 1831, he waged a
terrible, and, although often defeated, a virtually
[pg 302] successful warfare, against
the Russians, while he prosecuted the work of conversion
among the tribes of Islam who delayed to acknowledge his
mission, and to join in his enmity to the Russians, by the
extremities of bloodshed and rapine. His death, after an
heroic resistance, was hailed as a triumph by the Russians.
They counted on the extinction of the new sect in the defeat
of its leader, whose dead body they carried about the
country to prove the imposture of his pretensions. This
piece of barbarism produced an effect the reverse of what
they expected. The venerable face of the Imam, the attitude
in which he had expired, with one hand pointed as if to
heaven, was more impressive to those who crowded round the
body than his fearless enthusiasm had been,—and
thousands who till then had held aloof, now joined his
followers in venerating him as a prophet. Of this first
warrior-priest of Daghestan, Schamyl was the favorite
disciple and the most trusted soldier. Kasi-Mullah was not
killed until Schamyl had already fallen as it seemed, under
several deadly wounds:—his reappearance after this
bloody scene was but the first of many similar escapes, the
report of which sounds like a fable. He did not, however, at
once succeed to the dignity of Imam: the office was usurped
for more than a year by Hamsad Beg (Bey), whose rapacious
and savage treatment of some of the princely families of
Daghestan nearly caused a fatal reaction against the new
sect, and the destruction of its main support, the Murids.
Hamsad Beg performed no action of consequence against the
Russians; but expended his rage upon the natives allied with
them, or reluctant to obey his mandates. He was assassinated
in 1834, by some kinsmen of a princely house whose
territories he had usurped after a massacre of its princes.
In the affray which took place on this occasion, there
perished with him many of the fanatic Murids, who had become
odious as instruments of the cruelties of their Imam. On his
death, Schamyl was raised to the dignity,—but it was
some time before the mischief done by his predecessor was so
far repaired as to allow him to act with energy as the
prophet of the new doctrine. One of the ill effects of
Hamsad Beg’s iniquities had been the defection to the
Russians of n notable partisan—Hadjii Murad—for
many years a fatal thorn in the side of the independent
party.⁶
This and other difficulties, among which was the
unpopularity of the Murids under Hamsad Beg, were removed by
new alliances and precautions, while all that eloquence and
skill could perform was applied to restore the credit of the
religious system, before Schamyl could hazard a direct
attack of the Russian enemy, who meanwhile had taken
advantage of the delay and disunion to gain ground in many
parts of Daghestan. From the year 1839, however, the tide
rapidly turned; and the result, from that date until the
period at which the account closes (1845)—when
Woronzow was appointed to command in the Caucasus, with
nearly unlimited powers,—has been, that the Russians,
in spite of tremendous sacrifices, were constantly losing
ground and influence, while Schamyl gained both in equal
proportion. The details of the campaigns during this
interval are highly interesting; and we regret that
conditions of space forbid us to translate some of the
exciting episodes recorded by Herr Bodenstedt. We may,
however, extract the following account of the Caucasian
hero,—whose portrait, we believe, has never before
been so fully exhibited to European readers;—

“Schamyl is of middle stature; he has light hair, gray eyes,
shaded by bushy and well-arched eyebrows,—a nose finely
moulded, and a small mouth. His features are distinguished from
those of his race by a peculiar fairness of complexion and
delicacy of skin: the elegant form of his hands and feet is not
less remarkable. The apparent stiffness of his arms, when he
walks, is a sign of his stern and impenetrable character. His
address is thoroughly noble and dignified. Of himself he is
completely master; and he exerts a tacit supremacy over all who
approach him. An immovable stony calmness, which never forsakes
him, even in moments of the utmost danger, broods over his
countenance. He passes a sentence of death with the same
composure with which he distributes “the sabre of honor” to his
bravest Murids, after a bloody encounter. With traitors or
criminals whom he has resolved to destroy, he will converse
without betraying the least sign of anger or vengeance. He
regards himself as a mere instrument in the hands of a higher
Being; and holds, according to the Sufi doctrine, that all his
thoughts and determinations are immediate inspirations from
God. The flow of his speech is as animating and irresistible as
his outward appearance is awful and commanding. “He shoots
flames from his eyes, and scatters flowers from his
lips,”—said Bersek Bey, who sheltered him for some days
after the fall of Achulgo,—when Schamyl dwelt for some
time among the princes of the Djighetes and Ubiches, for the
purpose of inciting the tribes on the Black Sea to rise against
the Russians. Schamyl is now (circa 1847?) fifty years
old, but still full of vigor and strength: it is however said,
that he has for some years past suffered from an obstinate
disease of the eyes, which is constantly growing worse. He
fills the intervals of leisure which his public charges allow
him, in reading the Koran, fasting, and prayer. Of late years
he has but seldom, and then only on critical occasions, taken a
personal share in warlike encounters. In spite of his almost
supernatural activity, Schamyl is excessively
[pg 303] severe and temperate in his
habits. A few hours of sleep are enough for him: at times he
will watch for the whole night, without Showing the least
trace of fatigue on the following day. He eats little, and
water is his only beverage. According to Mohammedan custom,
he keeps several wives—[this contradicts Wagner, who
affirms that Schamyl always confined himself to one]; in
1844 he had three, of which his favorite, Dur
Heremen, (Pearl of the Harem) as she was called, was an
Armenian, of exquisite beauty.”

Will Russian arms prevail in the end? The following is Herr
Bodenstedt’s answer; after noticing the arrival of Woronzow,
and the expectations raised by his talents, by the immense
resources at his command, as well as by such events as the
storm of Schamyl’s stronghold of Cargo:—

“He who believes that the issue of this contest hangs on the
destruction of stone fortresses, on the devastation of tracts
of forest, has not yet conceived the essential nature of the
war in the Caucasus. This is not merely a war of men against
men—it is a strife between the mountain and the steppe.
The population of the Caucasus may be changed; the air of
liberty wafted from its heights will ever remain the same.
Invigorated by this atmosphere, even Russian hirelings would
grow into men eager for freedom: and among their descendants a
new race of heroes would arise, to point their weapons against
that servile constitution, to extend which their fathers had
once fought, as blind, unquestioning slaves.”

To this answer of Herr Bodenstedt’s we will add nothing of
our own. We are weary with waiting for the events of history
such as we would have them.

COOLING A BURNING SPIRIT.

An incident which occurred soon after the accession of the
present Sultan, shows that, in some respects, at least, he is
not indisposed to follow up the strong traditions of his race.
At the beginning of his reign, the Ulema was resolved, if
possible, to prevent the new Sultan from carrying on those
reforms which had ever been so distasteful to the Turks,
grating at once against their religious associations and their
pride of race, and which recent events had certainly proved not
to be productive of those good results anticipated by Sultan
Mamoud. To attain this object, the Muftis adopted the expedient
of working on the religious fears of the youthful prince. One
day as he was praying, according to his custom, at his father’s
tomb, he heard a voice from beneath reiterating, in a stifled
tone, the words, “I burn.” The next time that he prayed there
the same words assailed his ears. “I burn” was repeated again
and again, and no word beside. He applied to the chief of the
Imams to know what this prodigy might mean; and was informed in
reply, that his father, though a great man, had also been,
unfortunately, a great reformer, and that as such it was too
much to be feared that he had a terrible penance to undergo in
the other world. The Sultan sent for his brother-in-law to pray
at the same place, and afterward several others of his
household; and on each occasion the same portentous words were
heard. One day he announced his intention of going in state to
his father’s tomb, and was attended thither by a splendid
retinue, including the chief doctors of the Mahometan law.
Again, during his devotions, were heard the words, “I burn,”
and all except the Sultan trembled. Rising from his
prayer-carpet, he called in his guards, and commanded them to
dig up the pavement and remove the tomb. It was in vain that
the Muftis interposed, reprobating so great a profanation, and
uttering warnings as to its consequences. The Sultan persisted,
the foundations of the tomb were laid bare, and in a cavity
skillfully left among them was found—not a burning
Sultan, but a Dervise. The young monarch regarded him for a
time fixedly and in silence, and then said, without any further
remark or the slightest expression of anger, “You
burn?—We must cool you in the Bosphorus.” In a few
minutes more the dervise was in a bag, and the bag immediately
after was in the Bosphorus.—De Vere’s
Sketches.

[From Household Words.]

AN OLD HAUNT.

KILLING A GIRAFFE.

At every stride I gained upon the giraffes, and, after a
short burst at a swingeing gallop, I was in the middle of them,
and turned the finest cow out of the herd. On finding herself
driven from her comrades and hotly pursued, she increased her
pace, and cantered along with tremendous strides, clearing an
amazing extent of ground at every bound; while her neck and
breast, coming in contact with the dead old branches of the
trees, were continually strewing them in my path. In a few
minutes I was riding within five yards of her stern, and,
firing at a gallop, I sent a bullet into her back. Increasing
my pace, I next rode alongside, and, placing the muzzle of my
rifle within a few feet of her, I fired my second shot behind
the shoulder; the ball, however, seemed to have little effect.
I then placed myself directly in front, when she came to a
walk. Dismounting, I hastily loaded both barrels, putting in
double charges of powder. Before this was accomplished, she was
off at a canter. In a short time I brought her to a stand in
the dry bed of a watercourse, where I fired at fifteen yards,
aiming where I thought the heart lay, upon which she again made
off. Having loaded, I followed, and had very nearly lost her;
she had turned abruptly to the left, and was far out of sight
among the trees. Once more I brought her to a stand, and
dismounted from my horse. There we stood together alone in the
wild wood. I gazed in wonder at her extreme beauty, while her
soft dark eye, with its silky fringe, looked down imploringly
at me, and I really felt a pang of sorrow in this moment of
triumph for the blood I was shedding. Pointing my rifle toward
the skies, I sent a bullet through her neck. On receiving it
she reared high on her hind legs and fell back with a heavy
crash, making the earth shake around her. A thick stream of
dark blood spouted out from the wound, her colossal limbs
quivered for a moment, and she expired.—Cummings’
Adventures.

THE VETERAN KOLOMBESKI.

Several journals have spoken of the entry into the Hotel des
Invalides of a soldier, stated to be 126 years of age. This is
not quite correct. The following are some precise details
respecting this extraordinary man, who arrived at the Hotel on
the 21st inst.:—Jean Kolombeski, born at Astrona
(Poland), on the 1st of March, 1730, entered the service of
France, as a volunteer in the Bourbon regiment of infantry, in
1774, at the age of forty-four. He was made corporal in 1790,
at the age of sixty. He made all the campaigns of the
Revolution and of the Empire, in different regiments of
infantry, and was incorporated, in 1808, in the 3d regiment of
the Vistula. He was wounded in 1814, and entered the hospital
at Poitiers, which he soon afterward left to be placed en
subsistence in the 2d regiment of light infantry. On the
11th of October of the same year he was admitted into the 1st
company of sous-officiers sedentaires, and, in 1846,
into the 5th company of Veteran Sub-Officers. The last three of
these companies having just been suppressed by the Minister of
War, Kolombeski was placed en subsistence in the 61st
regiment of the line, received a retiring pension by decree of
May 17, 1850, and the Minister authorized his admission into
the Invalides. Kolombeski is, therefore, more than 120 years of
age; he reckons seventy-five and a half years of service, and
twenty-nine campaigns. He enjoys good health, is strong and
well made, and does not appear to be more than seventy or
eighty. He performed every duty with big comrades of the 5th
company of Veterans, When King Louis Philippe visited Dreus,
Kolombeski was presented to him, who, taking the decoration
from his breast, presented it to the veteran soldier. This is
the most astonishing instance of longevity that has, perhaps,
been ever known in the army. The Marshal Governor of the
Invalides ordered that Kolombeski should be brought to him on
his arrival; but, as the old soldier was fatigued, he was taken
to the infirmary, and the Governor, informed of it, went to his
bedside with General Petit, the commandant of the hotel, and
addressed the veteran in the kindest manner. The Governor has
issued an order that, for the future, all centenarian soldiers
admitted into the hospital shall mess with the officers, in
order to show his respect for their age, and for the long
services they have rendered to the state.—Galignani’s
Messenger.

ANECDOTE OF LORD BROUGHAM.

The “Life of the Rev. Dr. Hugh Heugh” has a description of
an interview which a deputation of Scotch dissenters had some
years ago with Lord Brougham. The Scotsman adds, from
its private knowledge, some odd incidents of the affair.

His lordship, on coming out of the court to meet the
deputation, immediately on being informed of their object,
burst out in a volley of exclamations to the effect that, but
for dissent, there would be “No vital religion—no vital
religion, gentlemen, no vital religion.” While pouring forth
this in a most solemn tone, he was all the while shaking
violently the locked doors of a lobby full of committee rooms,
into one of which he wished to find entrance, and calling for
an absent official not only in passionate tones, but in
phraseology which the reverend deputation, at first unwilling
to trust their own ears, were at last forced to believe was
nothing better than profane swearing. At last, he suddenly drew
himself up to the wall opposite a locked door, and with a
tremendous kick, smashed the lock, and entered (exclaiming,
first in a vehement and then in a solemn tone, but without
pause) “—that fellow! where the —— does he
always go to! No vital religion, gentlemen, no vital
religion—no, no, no.”

Footnote 1:
(return)

Trésor de Numismatique et de Glyptique; ou, Recueil
Général de Médailles, Monnaies, Pierres Gravées, Sceaux,
Bas-reliefs, Ornements, &c. Paris, 1850.

Footnote 2:
(return)

“Lachrymis oculos effusa nitentes.”

Footnote 3:
(return)

The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind; an
Autobiographical Poem. By William Wordsworth. London,
Moxon. [New York, Appletons.]

Footnote 4:
(return)

The Moohummadan Law of Sale, according to the Hunefeea
Code: from the Futawa Alumgeeree, a Digest of the whole
Law, prepared by command of the Emperor Aurungzebe
Alumgeer. Selected and translated from the original Arabic,
with an Introduction and explanatory Notes, by Neil B.E.
Baillie, Author of “The Moohummadan Law of inheritance.”
Published by Smith and Elder.

Footnote 5:
(return)

The people of the Caucasus, and their Struggle for
Liberty with the Russians—(Die Volker des
Caucasus, &c.) By Friedrich Bodenstedt. Second
Edition. Frankfurt am Main, Lizius; London, Nutt.

Footnote 6:
(return)

It is worth noting—as a characteristic of Russian
misrule and of its consequences—that this chieftain,
after having been a devoted soldier of the Emperor for
seven years, was goaded by the ill treatment of his
officers into abjuring the service; make the offer of his
sword to Schamyl, against whom he had fought with the
utmost animosity; was heartily welcomed by that prudent
leader, and became one of his principal lieutenants.