Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. LXXXI, No. 496, February 1857.
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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. LXXXI, No. 496, February 1857.

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BLACKWOOD’S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCCXCVI.      FEBRUARY 1857.      VOL. LXXXI.

CONTENTS.

1. THE WAR IN ASIA,

135

2. SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE.—NO. I. THE SAD FORTUNES OF THE REVEREND AMOS BARTON.—PART II.,

153

3. TICKET-OF-LEAVE.—A LETTER TO IRENÆUS,

173

4. THE ATHELINGS; OR, THE THREE GIFTS.—PART IX.,

189

5. FROM PERA TO BUCHAREST,

205

6. LETTERS FROM A LIGHTHOUSE.—NO. I.

227

7. LORD ST LEONARDS,

243

EDINBURGH:

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45 GEORGE STREET, AND 37 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON;

To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed.

SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

Lately Published.

INDEX

TO

THE FIRST FIFTY VOLUMES

OF

BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE.

In Octavo, pp. 588. Price 15s.

BLACKWOOD’S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCCXCVI.      FEBRUARY 1857.      VOL. LXXXI.

THE WAR IN ASIA.

The Russian Empire has two gates, through which her armies may march on their mission of territorial aggrandisement. These are not on her western front. Cossack absolutism, the sway of Muscovite principles, may yet spread to the Atlantic; but, territorially, Russia will never extend her rule westwards in Europe beyond the limits of the Slavonian race. The case is different along her southern frontier. Occupying the vast territories constituting that officina gentium from whence issued the invading hordes which overthrew in succession all the old governments of the civilised world—Hindoo, Persian, Roman, Saracenic, Byzantine—the Russian Empire still seeks expansion in the same direction. Half imbedded in its southern frontier lies the Black Sea, forming a barrier to landward progress nearly 800 miles long, and compelling the downward pressure of the colossal empire to divide into an eastern and western stream. Once the Black Sea is fairly enclasped by the dominions of the Czar, and the Bosphorus closed against hostile fleets, this inland sea will be no longer an obstacle, but a facility, to the southern advance of the Muscovite legions: but at present it is as we say,—an impassable expanse which must be turned by marching round its flanks. The regions to the east and west of this sea are the two Gates of Russia, through which the ambition of the Czars has sought and will continue to seek expansion. The one gate opens into Europe, the other into Asia. The former at present is shut—the latter stands open.

When at war with a restless and ambitious power—with a young and growing state whose rulers and people still prefer territorial extension to commercial development, it is wise, when closing one’s own frontier against attack, to leave open some other channel into which the energies of the foe may be directed. This is what the Continental Governments did at the close of the late war. The French Emperor, having served his own immediate purpose in the war, and fearing to face the eventualities which a prosecution of the contest might have produced, resolved abruptly to close it after the fall of Sebastopol. With this end in view, no further blow was allowed to be struck in the Crimea; and, at the same time, not a regiment was allowed to be sent to relieve Kars, or to support Omar Pasha in his important invasion of Georgia. Russia was proud, and would rather push the war to extremities than consent to humiliating terms of peace. The measures of the French Government saved her from such humiliation. The fall of Sebastopol was made a barren victory in the Crimea, and was allowed to be balanced in some measure by the fall of Kars in Armenia; and these facts, duly improved at the Congress of Peace, resulted in that Treaty of Paris which the Moniteur eulogised as “humiliating to none.” The fall of Kars, and the withholding of support from Omar Pasha’s invasion of Georgia, enabled the Continental Powers, while shutting the door against Russia in Europe, to leave wider open than ever her gate into Asia. The representatives of England, we hope, struggled against this decision, but they struggled vainly: (when it comes to a question of votes, the interests of the Continental Powers must always override those of insulated Britain).[1] And now we already begin to perceive the consequence. Russian prestige is greater than ever throughout western Asia. The capture of Kars enabled General Mouravieff for ten months to keep possession of that fortress and the surrounding region,—to distribute far and wide hand-bills announcing the triumph of the Czar, and representing it, by a colourable lie, as a victory over the arms of England. The wavering allegiance of the Kurdish tribes of Armenia has been half-won to the Czar. Persia has gone wholly over to the same side. A renewed onset is being made to complete the subjugation of the Caucasus, and render the isthmus between the Euxine and Caspian a broad highway for Russian advance. From Soujouk-kale to Erivan, from Erivan to the mouth of the Araxes, and thence northwards along the shores and upon the islands of the Caspian, an unusual mustering of troops and din of warlike preparation is going on. The eastern Gate of Russia already creaks on its hinges. Perhaps while we write, the Muscovite battalions are once more entering the thrice-despoiled territories of Persia,—this time all the more dangerously for her, and ominously for us, that they enter not as enemies but in the guise of friends.

It is long since Russia began to foray southwards by her eastern Gate. And it is important to note this, for it is only by the light of the past that we shall properly comprehend the true character of Russian aggression in this quarter. It is needless to rail at such aggression, for it is alike natural and inevitable. Russia lies between Europe and Asia like a vast lake, whose waters are slowly but steadily increasing, and which, hemmed in by steep banks on its western side, must inevitably overflow into the vast unbulwarked regions of Central Asia. As Russian wealth, population, and resources increase, the Muscovite tide will swell out more and more into the territories of Turkistan, and encroach more and more upon the native sovereignty of Persia. The tide will never recede,—for it is but the overflowings of the great fountains of Slavonian life, which promise, for ages to come, to continue pouring forth their populating streams into the half-vacant basins of Asia. Russian domination over the tribes of the Steppes and the organised communities of Persia and Anatolia is a mere question of time, which may be as surely predicted as that the Russian population will one day be double and treble what it is now. That population will for centuries have room to spread eastward across the Asiatic continent; but it will take that course reluctantly, and will prefer to foray southwards, until it reach a limit where other portions of the European race have become too firmly consolidated to be driven from their ground.

Commerce and ambition alike impel Russia to go forth conquering through her eastern gates. A century and a half ago the Czar Peter perceived this, and laid down the outlines of a vast plan of Asiatic conquest for the guidance of his imperial successors. By an error common to minds of high speculative and imaginative power—to whom, seeing clearly the future, distant events often appear too near and their realisation too easy—Peter himself does not seem to have adequately appreciated the obstacles to his projects, and by a bold dash at Khiva in 1717, attempted to win a vantage-ground which was not destined to be gained by Russia until the present day. The armed mission which he sent to that Khanate, to establish relations with the natives and to seize a gold mine, easily reached their destination; but being outwitted by the Khivans, they were induced to separate into detached parties, and were then cut to pieces. Six years afterwards witnessed the real commencement of his schemes of aggression. It was in 1723–25, when the power of Persia was prostrated by the revolt of the Affghans and the attacks of the Turks, that Russia first struck her fangs into her prey; and during the dismemberment of Persia which then occurred, the Russian forces seized the territories of the Shah lying between the Caspian and the Black Seas. The martial genius of Nadir Shah temporarily checked the progress of Muscovite ambition, and in 1735 compelled the Empress Anne to resign the captured provinces before they had been Russianised. But in due time the advances of Russia were resumed in a more subtle form; and in 1774 the Empress Catherine commenced a series of intrigues with the states lying to the south of the Caucasus, with a view to induce them to throw off their allegiance to Persia, and to place themselves under the protectorate of Russia. All the usual Muscovite seductions and threats were had recourse to: missions and subsidies were first employed, then the erection of fortresses, and ultimately the introduction of troops; and so successful were those arts that, in 1773, Mingrelia, Imeritia, and Georgia accepted the Russian protectorate. For twelve years Persia submitted to this unjust domination; and when at length, in 1795, Aga Mahomed Khan attempted to recover the Trans-Caucasian provinces, the Russians were victorious and pushed their way still farther along the shores of the Caspian. Thus, ere the death of Catherine, Russia was paramount all over the isthmus between the Caspian and Black Seas, and had secured for herself the long-coveted gate through which she was to push southwards. The advanced posts of Persia and Turkey had been first sapped and then carried, and now Russia was brought in contact with the main body of those empires. The ten years’ war with Persia, which terminated in 1814 by the peace of Gulistan, accomplished apparently little,—Russia having then fighting enough in Europe; but during its continuance Muscovite power was consolidated on the isthmus (the Circassians alone remaining unsubdued), and Persia surrendered the right of having ships of war on the Caspian, which handed over that sea to the exclusive domination of Russia. Twelve years more, and again there was war. The treaty which closed the former war became the occasion for commencing a new one, furnishing fresh triumphs to Russia; and at the close of hostilities in 1828, by the treaty of Turkomanchai, the provinces of Erivan (with the strong fortress of that name) and Nakchivan were ceded to the Czar,—thus extending the Muscovite frontier to the banks of the Araxes; while possession was kept of the province of Talish beyond that river, and a heavy indemnity (!) was exacted for the expenses of the war. To sum up,—in the period between 1774 and 1828, Russia advanced her frontier a thousand miles into Asia; so that the Russian regiment stationed at her farthest frontier-post, on the western shore of the Caspian, has as great a distance to march back to Moscow as onward to Attock on the Indus, and is actually farther from St Petersburg than from Lahore, the capital of the Punjaub.

Any one who has seen an empty bottle thrown into a river, will have perceived that at first the vessel shows great repugnance to be immersed by the fluid, and ever strives to leap towards, and keep itself buoyant by, the air; but that at last there comes a moment when, the invading water having fairly overbalanced the rival element, all struggle ceases, and the vessel, losing all motive power of its own, drifts along helplessly as if it were actually part of the engulfing stream. It was in 1828 that this turning-point came to Persia. Prior to that time British influence had been paramount at the Court of Teheran. Of the state of matters before Paskewitch’s conquests, we read: “Russia has always viewed with undisguised jealousy the ascendancy of English influence in the councils of Persia. She has not hesitated, at different times, to make it matter of formal complaint even that Persian troops are commanded by English officers, clothed in English uniforms, and supplied with English arms. In short, the whole machinery of the Persian government is put in motion immediately or remotely by English agents and by English influence.” How Russia has turned the tables upon us since this was written twenty-seven years ago! Moral as well as material causes, we are sorry to say, contributed to produce this result. It was inevitable that the influence of Russia, with her contiguous frontier and great military power, should one day predominate over that of Britain in Central Asia; but it is to be regretted that we ourselves should have furnished discreditable proofs of our inferiority. By the treaty of Gulistan in 1814, England pledged herself that Russia should fulfil the engagement to restore Talish; but Russia evaded doing so, and, either from weakness or bad faith, we took no steps to compel fulfilment of the promise. Again, at the breaking-out of the war in 1826, England was bound by treaty to assist Persia against any European power with an army from India, or to pay an annual subsidy of £100,000; yet England broke her pledge, on the plea that Persia had provoked the war, although a more transparent case of wolf and lamb never existed. Well might Mr Kaye remark of this proceeding, that “the backwardness of England was of dubious honesty, as it doubtless was of dubious expediency.” And Sir Harford Jones did not much exaggerate the consequences, when he said, that by the treaty of 1828 “Persia was delivered, bound hand and foot, to the Court of St Petersburg.”

The turning-point being passed, then began those demonstrations and expeditions against Herat, which have since, not without reason, occasioned us so much disquietude. To annex Herat is the most natural object of Persian ambition, and it is at the same time one which perfectly coincides with the views of the Russian government. Geographically as well as politically, Herat belongs to Affghanistan, of which it is the door. So far from being an appanage of the Shahs, it was, under the successors of Timour, the seat of a great empire; and in the early part of last century, the Affghans even extended their rule by conquest over Persia. Nadir Shah, however, when he set free his country, retaliated by capturing Herat, and planting there a Persian colony; and though the city quickly returned into the possession of its natural owners, the Affghan power no sooner began to decline than the Persian monarchs cast covetous eyes upon this important frontier city. So formidable was the Affghan power even at the commencement of the present century, that the principal object of the treaties between our Indian government and Persia was, that each might help the other if attacked by the dreaded mountaineers; but the civil wars which thereafter broke into fragments the Affghan empire, and arrayed clan against clan, and chief against chief, not only destroyed its aggressive power, but exposed the country to the attack of foreign arms and influence. So matters stood when the treaty of Turkomanchai first demonstrated to the Court of Teheran that Russia was more potent than England in Central Asia, and that it was better policy to propitiate the former than the latter. Accordingly, in 1832, Persia commenced preparations to attack Herat, and a Russian officer of engineers was ready to accompany the expedition. An early exertion of British influence succeeded in preventing the enterprise being carried out; but just four years afterwards, in 1836, the project was revived,—the Russian ambassador at the same time urging the Shah to make haste, lest Britain should again interpose. Sir Henry Ellis, who was then our envoy at the Persian court, lost no time in apprising his government of what was in preparation, and of urging them to take vigorous measures to frustrate the project. His own remonstrances with the Persian government were vain; a quarrel was even picked with him à l’Orientale—a horseman under his protection being seized by the Persian Government, just as the wife of Mirza Hashem was eighteen months ago; and, ultimately, like Mr Murray, he felt compelled to strike his flag, and withdraw from Teheran. Meanwhile the Shah had set out on his famous expedition against Herat, with the Russian ambassador Simonich in his train; while Captain Vicovich, a secret agent of the Russian government, armed with a holograph letter from the Czar, was busily endeavouring to procure the support of the Affghan chiefs. Fortunately, Eldred Pottinger, a young lieutenant of the Bombay artillery, was then in Herat, and conducted the defence of the place with a courage and ability which have immortalised his name. So interested was Russia in this attack on Herat, that she remitted £25,000 of the debt contracted by Persia in 1828, in order that it might be expended in fitting out the expedition, and engaged to remit the remainder if the expedition proved successful. The Russian Embassy accompanied the expedition, a body of Russian troops (styled “deserters”) aided in the siege, and the assaults were led by Russian officers. But all was in vain. From the first investment in November 1836 to the final raising of the siege in September 1837, three desperate assaults were made upon the town, and were repulsed by the garrison, led by the heroic Pottinger,—the assailants on one of those occasions losing 1700 men. These bloody repulses, combined with the appearance of a British force in the Persian Gulf, the seizure of the island of Karrak, and a threat of active hostilities on our part, at length led the Shah and his counsellors to abandon the enterprise. Simultaneously with these events in Asia, the dispute arising from the capture of the “Vixen” in the Black Sea showed the irritation subsisting between the British and Russian Governments. And it is instructive to note that all the time that the Russian ambassador was instigating the Shah to attack Herat, and that Russian money, officers, and troops, were assisting him in the enterprise, Count Nesselrode professed to agree with the British Government as to the viciousness of the course pursued by the Persian monarch, and affirmed that the conduct of the Russian ambassador and agents was in opposition to his instructions! A good illustration of the truth of Karamsin’s remark, that it is a maxim of the Russian government to repudiate the conduct of its officers until their project is accomplished,—thus preventing opposition until it is too late for other governments to interfere.

Although this attempt upon Herat was foiled, it naturally occasioned our Indian Government much disquiet; and it was with a view to strengthen our influence in that important region that the ill-fated invasion of Affghanistan was undertaken. Both in a political and military point of view, the expedition was characterised by the grossest blunders; and the disastrous retreat from Cabool only served to augment the ascendancy of Russia at the Court of Teheran. Indeed, to so low an ebb had all other foreign influence sunk at that court, that M. Ferrier records that, during his residence in Persia, both British and French subjects were in the practice of employing the good offices of the Russian ambassador, as they knew that their own envoys were powerless at court. When war broke out between Russia and the Allies in Europe, and troops from India were being brought to the battle-fields of the Crimea, it was only natural that Russia should seek to convert her ascendancy at the Persian Court into a means of disquieting us on the side of India. Etiquette is everything in the East, and when Asiatic governments become hostile, they almost always choose to testify their feelings by putting a slight on the representative of the Power whom they mean to defy. In this way the “Mrs Hashem affair” was not so unimportant as it appears to European eyes; and from the animus displayed on this and previous occasions by the Persian Government, it is clear that had Mr Murray continued at his post, he would only have been subjected to fresh demands and contumely. It was the last of a series of insults directed against the British Government; and to those who assume it as the cause of the present war, it is sufficient to say that not even the Persian Government regards it in that light, or alleges it as a pretext for its attack upon Affghanistan. The fall of Kars, in fact, threw Persia completely into the arms of Russia; and the old design of attacking Herat and extending Persian influence over Affghanistan was eagerly revived. It is alleged that, in prospect of the war in Europe continuing, an arrangement had been made by which a Russian army was to land at Astrabad, and support the Shah in his advance towards our Indian frontier. There is much probability in the statement; and it is certain that Persian vessels on the Caspian assisted the Russians in conveying warlike stores for the use of Mouravieff’s army,—thus breaking the neutrality which the Shah professed so greatly to respect. But, leaving the conjectured connivance between Persia and Russia during the war to be revealed at a future time, let us look simply at the overt acts of the former Power, and endeavour to set forth what actually occurred. With this view we must give our readers a glimpse into Affghan politics and the state of matters at Herat.

At the commencement of the present century, Affghanistan and Cashmere, with parts of Khorassan and Scinde, were united under the rule of Zeeman Shah, grandson of that Ahmed Shah who with his Affghans broke the power of the Mahrattas at the terrible battle of Paniput in 1761. But the days of the Dooraunee Empire were numbered, and an era of suicidal convulsions was about to commence. Zeeman was deposed, and his brother Mahmoud succeeded. The royal family belonged to the Suddozee tribe, whose rivals in the state were the great clan of the Barukzees, headed by Futteh Khan and his twenty brothers, one of the youngest of whom was Dost Mahomed. Futteh Khan was prime-minister, and proved a maire du palais to the roi fainéant. In the struggles that ensued, Futteh Khan was barbarously murdered by the Suddozees; but finally the Barukzee brothers triumphed, and by 1823 had partitioned the country among themselves,—Dost Mahomed, whose abilities had raised him to the foremost place among his brethren, obtaining Cabool as his share. One corner alone of their old empire remained to the fallen Suddozee race—namely, the principality of Herat, to which place the deposed Mahmoud retired with his son, Prince Kamram. The prince in due course succeeded his father, and was ruling Herat, with one Yar Mahomed for his vizier, when the Persians attacked the place in 1837. On Kamram’s death, the sceptre departed from the Suddozees, and fell peaceably into the hands of the old vizier, Yar Mahomed, who had long been the virtual ruler; and who at his decease, a few years ago, transmitted his power to his son, Mahomed Said—a weak and dissolute wretch, willing to barter the independence of Herat for Persian support; but whose myrmidons, seeing him immersed in sensuality, took advantage of his apathy so to tyrannise over the community that all classes wished for a revolution. Persia resolved that the revolution should come from her side; and the Persian envoy at Herat became prime director of the enterprise. It was his custom to take a ride of twenty or thirty miles every afternoon, returning to the city about ten at night, the gate being regularly opened to him. On these occasions he was escorted by about a hundred horsemen, and generally rode towards Gorian, on the road to Meshed, the Persian capital of Khorassan. Now, there was stationed between Gorian and Meshed, for the purpose of keeping in check the wild Turkomans, a certain Prince Yusoof, nephew to the departed Shah Kamram, and therefore well fitted to be the instrument for effecting a revolution in Herat. With this prince and Esa Khan, a chief of Herat, the Persian envoy arranged the plans for a surprise; and when all was ready, he was joined on his ride one afternoon by Prince Yusoof and a body of Persian cavalry. The first quarter of the night was passed when they arrived at the gates of Herat; and on admission being given to the envoy as usual, his escort sabred the guard, and the Prince with his cavalry rushed in, took possession of the city, and advanced against the Arg citadel. The besotted ruler, in his cups, shot the servant who first reported to him that the enemy was in the city, but at length, arousing himself, ordered a charge when it was too late. The result was that he and all his relatives were captured and put to death; and Prince Yusoof, a member of the royal Suddozee race, mounted the throne of Herat. His first act was to thank the Shah for his success, and to beg him to continue his protection and freely command his services;—to which the Shah replied by assuring him of aid against his present or future enemies, and informing him that all the commanders of the Persian forces in Khorassan had been strictly enjoined to watch over his welfare, and punish the disturbers of his dominion.[2]

It may easily be believed that Dost Mahomed of Cabool, and his brother chiefs of the Barukzee clan, by no means relished the appearance of a prince of the Suddozee line at Herat. The Persian Government had placed him there as a means of establishing its influence in Affghanistan, and as a thorn in the side of the old Ameer; and one of the prince’s first acts was to push forward a detachment to take possession of Furrah, a town half-way on the road to Candahar. Upon this, the Barukzee chiefs resolved to forget their disagreements, and unite to prevent the encroachments of the common foe. Indeed, the aspect of affairs had begun to look menacing for the independence of Affghanistan. Not only had Herat been revolutionised by Persian agency, but Khiva had fallen under the domination of Persia and Russia; and the king of Bokhara was so concerned by these menacing events, and by the increasing number of Persian troops in Khorassan, that a letter from Bokhara (Sept. 1855) states that “owing to his disquiet he frequently fails in going to the Friday prayers in the Great Mosque.” Kokan, the third and remaining state of Central Asia, was likewise apprehensive of a Muscovite attack; and several Russian agents were reported to be wandering about in Turkistan as petty traders, professing themselves Jews. The danger had been early descried by the shrewd old Ameer of Cabool, who had sent a friendly embassy and presents to the king of Khiva; but ere they arrived the king had been killed, the Russians and Persians were in possession, and the Affghan embassy was treated with the utmost contumely. Indeed, the ambitious projects of the Persian government had been revealed to himself by an offer from the Shah to aid him with money and troops against all foreign powers, if he would consent to own the suzerainty of Persia. Turning a deaf ear to the insidious proposal, the old Ameer sent a trusty messenger to Mahomed Said at Herat, a short time before that prince’s death, to warn him of his danger from Persia; but that dissolute wretch being in his cups when the messenger arrived, ordered his beard to be shaved, and nearly had him blown out of the mouth of a cannon! Turning to the British, Dost Mahomed contracted with our Indian Government a treaty of general amity, but failed to obtain from it the guarantee which he desired for the independence of Affghanistan and Herat.

It is manifest that the Persian government was resolved to find or make a pretext for the actual invasion of Affghanistan. In December 1855, when Prince Yusoof was still its obedient vassal, the Teheran Official Gazette announced the intention of the government to despatch an army to Herat,—alleging in excuse that Dost Mahomed had made himself master of Candahar, to the prejudice of the relatives of the deceased sirdar of that place, Kohendil Khan (a half-brother of Dost Mahomed, who with his family leant much to Persia), and that he meditated an attack upon Herat. In the same article it was insinuated that these proceedings on the part of the Dost were instigated and aided by the British Government; nevertheless the Persian Court, following the usual Muscovite ruse, professed its desire to maintain inviolate its position of neutrality. In a subsequent manifesto, published before despatching the army, the Shah represented Mr Murray’s retirement as a mere personal misunderstanding, and explained the Herat expedition as one undertaken at the urgent entreaty of Prince Yusoof, in order to save the place from the threatened attack of Dost Mahomed’s forces. In refutation of these allegations, it is sufficient to say that neither the Ameer nor a single soldier of his had been within 200 miles of Herat, and that he had made no preparations for such an attack. The Persian Government at the same time announced its intention of despatching a corps of 20,000 men to Candahar, to reinstate Kohendil Khan’s son in the government.

Last spring the Persian army commenced its march to Herat, and in due course reached its destination. At Gorian, thirty miles to the west of Herat, they met and cut up a body either of Affghans or of Turkoman cavalry coming to the assistance of the menaced city. Prince Yusoof inclined to favour the Persian cause; and with his consent the first Persian detachment that arrived, under Sano Khan, was admitted into the city. But the Barukzee party is strong in Herat; the Alekozee clan, to which Yar Mahomed belonged, and of which Esa Khan is a chief, likewise declared against the Persians; and the result was that Sano Khan was ejected, and preparations made for a vigorous defence. Messengers were sent to Dost Mahomed, then at Candahar, and to the British Commissioner in Scinde, urgently entreating aid; and several successful sorties were made, blowing up the Persian magazines, and destroying their supplies. The defence was conducted jointly by Prince Yusoof and Esa Khan. Meanwhile the main body of the Persian army arrived under Murad Mirza, the commander-in-chief, raising the besieging force to 30,000 men; but it was not till the end of August that any serious action took place. Of the two great sects which divide the Mahomedan world, the Persians belong to one (Sheahs) and the Affghans and Turks to the other (Sunnees). A portion of the population of Herat, probably descendants of the Persian colony planted by Nadir Shah, are Sheeites; and betwixt certain chiefs of this sect and their co-religionists without, a secret correspondence was opened; and it was concerted that about noon, when Esa Khan and his chief officers were at prayers in the mosque, a body of Persians should surprise and take possession of one of the gates and the tower which commanded it. On the 29th August the attempt was made with success, and the gate and tower were seized by a detachment of the besieging force; but the main body remained inactive, and Esa Khan, hastily collecting his troops, gallantly led them against the enemy. The mêlée was so confused that the Persians were unable to use their muskets, and, overpowered by the rush of the Affghans, armed with hanjars, were driven out with great slaughter. Being pursued by the Affghans beyond the gates, the routed Persians suffered still more severely, till they were carried off by a brigade sent to their rescue. Reinforcements, however, continued to arrive to the besieging army; intrenchments were thrown up around each gate, to make the blockade complete; and a native eyewitness states that “the Persians built barracks for their troops, so that there are so many buildings in the camp that it appears to form another city rivalling Herat.” M. Buhler, a French officer, who was sent to the camp with special recommendations from the Shah, gave an impulse of energy to the whole army; and by his advice the trenches were pushed far in advance, till at several points the head of the boyau was within from ten to fifteen yards of the ditch. Discouragement began to spread in the city; provisions were scarce; the Sheeites were deserting and taking service with the enemy; the succours promised by Dost Mahomed were not forthcoming, and defections were reported among the Affghan chiefs. Finding his affairs desperate, Prince Yusoof made an attempt to escape from the city—other accounts say he was ejected by the Affghans; and, being taken by the Persians, was sent as a prisoner to Teheran, where he received the pardon of the Shah.

The defence now devolved wholly upon Esa Khan, who appears to have acted throughout with much gallantry. But it was impossible to avert the fall of the place. By the third week of October a considerable breach had been made at the foot of one of the numerous towers which flank the walls of the town; but in order to reach that spot it was necessary to carry an advanced work, which had been erected at a former time by the advice of British officers. The Persian attacking columns, composed of picked troops, rushed forward to the assault with intrepidity; and the Affghans, though they stood the first shock, were soon obliged to give way. Upon this, seeing that further resistance was impossible, Esa Khan (25th October) surrendered, and Herat was taken possession of by the Persians.

Nor was Herat the goal of Persian aggression. At an early period of the siege, a Persian corps had been pushed forward to Furrah, an Affghan town about 180 miles due south from Herat, at the point where the main road turns eastward towards Candahar. Furrah, although surrounded by a high earthen rampart, appears to have been captured without opposition; and thereafter a further advance was made towards Geerishk (a town lying between Furrah and Candahar, and within 60 miles of the latter city), where some skirmishing took place between the Persians and the advanced guard of the Ameer’s forces,—about 8000 of whom were stationed for the defence of Candahar. The latest intelligence reports that the Persian army has greatly extended itself in Affghanistan. It has pushed southwards from Furrah, taking possession of the province of Seistan—as well as eastwards, threatening Khelat and Candahar. And the result of these successes, following the capture of Herat, has been to induce not a few of the Affghan chiefs to lean to Persia as the winning side,—among others, Sultan Mahomed, the ex-chief of Peshawur, who was caught intriguing with the Persians against his brother the Ameer, and by the latter was summarily ordered off to Cabool.

Independently of any treaty forbidding Persia to invade Affghanistan, it is obvious that the British had as clear a right to defend that country as the Persians had to attack it. Our aid, moreover, had been urgently solicited by the Affghans themselves. A proclamation of war, accordingly, was made at Calcutta, on the 1st of November; and a fortnight afterwards a naval expedition was despatched from Bombay for the Persian Gulf, where the island of Karrak (seized in the former war) has been reoccupied, and the town and port of Bushire taken possession of. In the proclamation of war (as is too commonly the case in diplomatic documents), the reasons of common-sense and national interest are passed over in silence; and the whole ground of hostilities is made to rest upon the convention concluded between Colonel Sheil and the Persian Government in January 1853—of which more anon. As it is important to note the terms of the proclamation, we quote its principal clauses. After referring to the convention of 1853, it proceeds as follows:—

“By those articles the Persian Government engaged not to send troops to Herat on any account, unless foreign troops—that is, troops from the direction of Cabool or Candahar, or other foreign country—should invade Herat. In the event of troops being sent, the Persian Government engaged that the said troops should not enter the city of Herat; and that, on the return of the foreign troops towards their own territory, the Persian troops should be immediately withdrawn from the neighbourhood of Herat to Persian soil.

“The Persian Government also engaged to abstain from all interference whatsoever in the internal affairs of Herat, whether ‘in taking possession, or occupying, or assuming the sovereignty, or governing, except in so far as interference existed between the two parties during the lifetime of the late Yar Mahomed.’

“And, lastly, the Persian Government engaged to relinquish all pretension to and demand for the coinage, or the reading of the Khootbeh, or any other acknowledgment of allegiance or subjection on the part of the people of Herat to the government of Persia.

“It was, at the same time, stipulated that, so long as there should be no interference of any sort whatever on the part of the British Government in the affairs of Herat, the engagements contracted by the Persian Government, as aforesaid, should remain in full force and effect. On the other hand, it was agreed in the name of the British Government, that ‘if any foreign power, such as the Affghans or others,’ should wish to interfere with, or take possession of Herat, the British Government, on the requisition of the Persian Ministers, would not object to restrain such foreign power by friendly advice, ‘so that Herat might remain in its own state of independence.’

“While the British Government has faithfully and constantly adhered to the obligations which it accepted [?] under the agreement of January 1853, the Government of Persia has manifested a deliberate and persevering disregard of the reciprocal engagements, by which at the same time it became bound, and is now endeavouring to subvert by force the independence of Herat, which was the declared object of the agreement in question.”

Herat, the proximate cause of this war, needs a word of description. The Times asks, “Where is Herat?” and as it is obvious that every year will give the British nation a livelier interest in that part of the world, it may be useful to give a general sketch of the locality. Let us say, then, that Affghanistan, with its five millions of a warlike race, intervenes like a huge quadrangular mountain-citadel between India and Persia,—and that Herat is the only gate by which entrance can be obtained to this citadel from the west. The lofty Suleiman range of mountains, running parallel with the Indus, bounds Affghanistan on the east; the still more lofty range of the Hindoo Koosh (a continuation of the Himalayas) bounds it on the north; to the south, the sandy plains of Beloochistan stretch between it and the sea; and on the west it is separated from Persia by the deserts of Khorassan. Across those deserts the only passage for an army is to be found at their north side, where two or three routes exist more or less practicable for troops. These routes all converge and unite as they approach the north-west angle of Affghanistan, where stands HERAT. This city, then, is the door which must be opened before entrance can be obtained to the quadrangular mass of mountains, valleys, and waterless plateaus which constitute Affghanistan. Its situation is one of great military and commercial importance. The peaceful files of the caravan, and the dread battalions of war, alike pass through it on their march from India to Persia, or from Persia to India. The long camel-trains from Delhi, Mooltan, and Lahore pass through it, bearing the merchandise of India and the manufactures of England to the distant towns and oases of Persia and Turkistan; and so completely is Herat a gateway of commerce that it is called Bunder, or Port,—although the only sea upon which it borders are seas of sand. The march of conquest has passed through it from time immemorial. The cavalry-host of Timour and the disciplined army of Nadir Shah, in their invasions of India, went and came by this route; and though Alexander the Great, Gengis Khan, and Baber marched by Balkh, and crossed the Hindoo Koosh immediately to the north of Cabool, the route by Herat is the only one practicable for an army with the usual complement of artillery. The country around Herat affords an admirable halting-place for armies. It is a spacious plain, thirty miles long and half as broad, once studded with villages, and still exhibiting a fair expanse of gardens, vineyards, and corn-fields; while the Herat river and “the bright waters of small running streams [canals?] lighten the pleasant landscape,” and fertilise the plain. In the hamlets and gardens around, the celebrated attar, or otto of roses, is manufactured; and such is the profusion of this regal flower that Herat has been styled the City of Roses. In the midst of the plain stands the city, now much fallen from its olden prosperity, but still containing a population of about fifty thousand, and destined ever to retain much wealth and importance from lying in the track of the caravans. Its staple commodities are silk, assafœtida, and saffron; and the principal merchants of the place are Hindoos. Like most Asiatic towns, there is much dirt and desolation within; yet water, that prime necessity of Oriental life, is so abundant that almost every house has a fountain, besides the public ones in the bazaars. The city, which forms a square, each side of which is about a mile long, is strongly fortified for an Eastern town, being encircled by a solid bastioned earthen wall and wet ditch; and within there is a citadel, a square castle built of burnt brick, elevated on a mound, sufficiently strong to constitute a rallying-point, but incapable of separate defence. Abundant crops of wheat and barley, and every kind of fruit known in Persia, are supplied by the fertile region around; and though cattle are not very numerous, there are large flocks of the broad-tailed sheep so well known and prized in Central Asia. Thus no better camping-ground and quarters could be found for an army; and as an intermediate station between the deserts on the west and the Affghan mountains on the east, it is for such a purpose invaluable. It is a vast place d’armes, where all assaulting columns from the west must unite and recruit before making their final attack upon the defences of our Indian empire. To speak in miniature, it is just such a place as a skilful defender of India would desire to cover with a horn-work, in order to prevent the enemy from getting possession of a spot where they could collect their forces under cover, and from which they could so advantageously push forward their assault upon our interior works of defence.

“We have a garden, which is India; the walls are the fortified towns of Tartary and Affghanistan. Let the Russians once seize them, and our garden is theirs.” So said Sir Richmond Shakspere to the Khan of Khiva, in language not more finely figurative than true; and M. Ferrier, the French officer who lately wandered with the caravans throughout that region, and who has elaborately speculated on the future of Russian and Anglo-Indian power in the East, adds, “I believe he is right.” In the imperial policy of Russia, designs upon India have been very long cherished. First sighted by the genius of Peter, and first practically contemplated by the madman Paul; talked of by Alexander and Napoleon, and sketched out like a grand dream by the latter, the invasion of India is a design never laid aside at the Court of St Petersburg. But apart from the question of design, look at the mere facts. Russia is advancing farther and farther into Asia, nearer and nearer to the bulwarks of our Indian empire. “If we go on at this rate,” said Baron Brunow to Sir John Hobhouse, in 1837, “the Cossack and the Sepoy will soon meet on the banks of the Oxus.” They will so meet some day. Russia knows this, and intends this; and it were well that the grand issue to which things are tending should be timeously perceived in England. Nothing can stop the progress of Russia through Central Asia,—one might as well think of stopping the welling of a fountain or the movement of a glacier. And before this generation pass away, Russia will have organised the forces of Persia on her side, and be sitting in armed leaguer around our mountain outworks of Affghanistan. For we hardly contemplate the possibility of the British Government being so demented as to allow these hostile powers to effect a lodgment in the Affghan territories.

When engaged in a desperate war with Great Britain in Europe, it was most natural for Russia to seek to disquiet us on the side of India. But even before the war, our Government had felt the serious inconveniences resulting from the downfall of British ascendancy at the Court of Teheran. Persia is lastingly covetous of Herat; and knowing that Russia, now the dominant power in Central Asia, is secretly but assuredly in favour of the project, it was with difficulty that the Shah could be induced to keep his hands off the coveted city, or to pay ordinary respect to our embassy, which was always on the watch to thwart him. Rarely has the foreign policy of this country been more actively and beneficially directed than during the nine months that Lord Malmesbury presided at the Foreign Office; and it is to this statesman that we owe the “convention” of January 1853, by which Persia bound herself to abstain from attacking, occupying, or making any claim of sovereignty over Herat. This convention was signed by the Persian Government, but was never ratified by ours. An attempt is being now made to show that this non-ratification is of no importance, as the convention was simply a pledge on the part of Persia, and was duly signed by her. But this is not true,—for it contained a reciprocal agreement on the part of the British Government to restrain any Affghan power from attacking Herat; therefore, not being ratified by our Government, the whole convention is null. The question naturally arises,—Why was not the treaty ratified? The explanation of this unusual and unfortunate circumstance demands consideration. Diplomacy often keeps secret from one generation what is duly revealed to the next, (when the information is useless); and probably it will ere long be known that this country was nearer a rupture with Russia in 1852 than the public are aware of. In an article on the Aberdeen Ministry (July 1855), we mentioned the anti-Russian policy of Lord Derby’s Administration as a secret cause of the abrupt overthrow of the Conservative rule. Russian influence prevented the appointment of Lord de Redcliffe to the Foreign Office; and anecdotes are current which indicate that the differences between the two Governments were so great as to threaten even a warlike result. Persia, in fact, was giving us serious provocations, and went the length of officially announcing her intention to regard Herat as an appanage, which she would maintain by force of arms against any Affghan power that might contest her claim. If we are to believe M. Ferrier, a Russian force of 5000 men was simultaneously (autumn of 1852) landed at Astrabad, and advanced eastwards up the river Attruck (which forms the boundary between Persia and Turkistan), and was only recalled upon an ultimatum to that effect being presented by England at St Petersburg. At that time the British Government threatened to break off diplomatic relations with the Court of Teheran, and directed Colonel Sheil to intimate that hostile measures would be had recourse to in the event of Persia making any attack upon the independence of Affghanistan. The result of this firmness on the part of the British Government was, that the Persian Government gave up its pretensions to Herat, and signed the terms of treaty required by Colonel Sheil. The treaty was concluded in January 1853, but in the preceding month a change of Ministry had taken place in England. Lord Aberdeen and the “Coalition” had displaced Lord Derby; and philo-Russianism and implicit faith in the word and policy of the Czar had become the order of the day. Therefore, say we, the treaty was never ratified. If there be another explanation, let it be stated, and let blame fall upon the right shoulders. But this much is certain, that in consequence of the non-ratification of that treaty, the proclamation of war with Persia issued by our Government is groundless; for it founds wholly upon a violation of that treaty, and the treaty is utterly null.

When the war in Europe commenced, the Shah, flattered by Russia, saw in it a favourable opportunity for reviving his projects against Herat and Affghanistan; and so he plunged into the present quarrel. Despite his professions of neutrality, the crafty Persian is said to have followed the diplomatic and strategic counsels of the Russian Government; and there is reason to believe that, but for the intervention of the Paris negotiations, a Russian armament would have crossed the Caspian early in spring, and occupied the Persian towns of Amol and Astrabad,—the goal of the expedition being Herat. The Peace of Paris, though it stopped the actual entrance of the Russians into Persia, allowed the Court of St Petersburg to make a great addition to her forces on the Caspian; and at the beginning of November, immediately after the fall of Herat, orders were given at St Petersburg to assemble an army of 40,000 men on the Persian frontiers. Prince Bariatinski was appointed Lieutenant-General of the Caucasian provinces, with ampler powers than his predecessors. All the war-steamers on the Caspian have been fully manned by the arrival of seamen from the naval ports. The war-magazines throughout the whole region, in part exhausted by the war, have been refilled; and it appears that both troops and stores have of late been transported by water to Astrabad, or the islands adjoining it. The “fiery” Chruleff commands the corps-d’armée echeloned from Bakou to Erivan, along the verge of the Persian frontier; and as the principal weight of the Russian armaments is accumulated in this quarter, it is to be expected that the main intervention (if there be one) will take place from this point. Several staff-officers have been despatched into the adjoining Persian province of Mazanderan, to reconnoitre the passage for troops and to draw topographical plans; and in the event of invasion, it is designed to occupy strongly the defiles of the Caspian Gates and of Komis, as it is by these two points that the centre of Persia can be approached. While these preparations are in progress, the semi-official letters from St Petersburg which appear in the Continental journals, boast that, despite the noisy demonstrations of England, Russia, owing to her silent preparations, will be able to take the upper hand of us in Persia; and the Russian journal Le Nord points to Persia “as a field of battle upon which, one day or other, there will be measured the relative strength of two great powers, which are at the same time European and Asiatic; and where will be ultimately decided the fortunes of Russia.”

The long-debated question as to the possibility of Russia attacking India is now universally regarded as solved in the affirmative. Those who once so stoutly denied it, must have been men who could not look beyond the present hour, and conceived that the world would stand still ever as it was in their day. Every decade of years has been removing some difficulty which these men thought insuperable. In these days of railways, telegraphs, and steam-navigation (of all of which Russia is availing herself), the remaining difficulties will vanish still more rapidly. Russia is not ready for an actual onset upon our Indian empire, but she is both ready and willing to engage with us in warlike rivalry for ascendancy over the intervening region of Persia, and will push forward her Asiatic vassals against the Indian ramparts which she herself is not yet ready to assail. The policy of Russia is a game of centuries. She will not spring too soon; she has learnt that grand secret of success—to wait. But waiting, with her, is not inaction; and her approaches towards India are now sufficiently far advanced to cause us active disquietude. She has begun in earnest to push forward her tirailleurs against us preparatory to the pitched battle. She will continue to throw Persia against our first parallel of defence, Affghanistan; and, if unopposed, will carry the sap of bribery and coercion through that mountain-rampart up to the very plains of India. Henceforth we may look for a series of harassing attacks, increasing in magnitude—wandering Turkomans and civilised Persians being alike pressed into the service, until Russia descend herself into the arena, and press the assault with all her forces. It is at present only an affair of outposts; but such skirmishes often decide the issue of the ensuing battle, by allowing one side or other to seize posts of vantage which dominate over the rest of the field. Such a post is Herat; and if we do not get the Persians quickly expelled from it, we shall give them time to fortify and maintain it until the Russians also may arrive on the scene,—in which case the contest around its walls would at once assume most formidable proportions.

It is important to note the means and routes by which the Russians may advance to Affghanistan. It has been far too much the custom of geographers, as well as of the multitude, to regard all unknown regions as desert. Blank expanses in maps, undotted by the tiny circles which represent towns, we are too apt to look upon as uninhabitable solitudes, forgetful that the ignorance of the chart-maker may have as much to do with the matter as any want of population and fertility in the region itself. In this way we have been accustomed, from our schooldays upwards, to regard the whole interior of Africa as an expanse of arid sand, whereas the recent explorations of Dr Livingstone and others show it to be in many parts one of the most luxuriant regions of the earth. We suspect that a larger portion of Central Asia will be found habitable and fertile than is now believed; and we shall see immediately, on the testimony of M. Ferrier and others, corroborated by the inductions of common sense, that not only the routes from the Caspian to Herat, but also those viâ Khiva and the Oxus, do not lie through such arid wastes as is commonly supposed. Omne ignotum pro deserto seems to be as common a notion in geography, as is the tendency in other sciences to make synonymous terms of the unknown and the wonderful.

In describing the routes by which Russia is advancing towards the mountain-portals of India, let us start from the heart of the Czar’s empire, viz., St Petersburg and Moscow,—twin capitals, already united to one another by railway, and soon about to be similarly united with the western and southern frontiers of the empire. From Moscow, the ancient and semi-Asiatic capital of Russia, the route stretches north-east to the banks of the Volga at Nishni-Novgorod,—the water-gate to Central Asia, and the scene of the great fair to which traders annually repair from all parts of northern and central Asia. The projected Moscow and Novgorod railway will encounter no engineering difficulties; for the country is an undulating plain, diversified by low hills, none of which rise more than five hundred feet above the sea-level. From Novgorod the route to Asia is by water, on the broad and vast stream of the Volga, upon which ply steamboats and craft of all kinds, in numbers already great, and yearly increasing; and by this cheapest of all kinds of conveyance, stores and troops are annually transported to and from the Persian frontiers. Sixteen or seventeen hundred miles of this watery highway, running south-eastwards, bring us to Astrakan, where the Volga debouches into the Caspian Sea. Here a long sheet of water opens out, extending nearly 700 miles from north to south, and varying from 100 to 250 miles in breadth. With the exception of a part of the western coast adjoining the mouth of the Terek, the shores are said to be bold, and the water so deep that in some places 450 fathoms will not reach the bottom. This inland sea is in the exclusive possession of Russia. No ship of war can sail its waters unless it bear the Russian flag. Indeed Persia, forbidden by treaty to have armed vessels of her own in that sea, has for a long time been compelled to invoke the assistance of the Russian war-ships, as a means of coercing the Turkomans on the eastern coast; the consequence of which has been, that not only the Turkomans, but the population of the Persian provinces adjoining the Caspian, have learnt to stand more in awe of the Russians than of their natural rulers. The islands of the Caspian virtually belong to Russia, and two important insular groups, one in the bay of Balkan, half-way down the eastern side of the sea, and another in the bay of Astrabad, in the south-eastern corner, have just been seized by the Muscovites, as if in preparation for ulterior movements on the adjoining portions of the mainland.

From the shores of the Caspian, Russia is preparing to advance by two grand converging lines upon Affghanistan. Of these lines, one sets out from the north-eastern shores of the Caspian, the other from its south-eastern extremity. The latter, starting from Astrabad and proceeding straight to Herat, seems to us designed for the main attack; the former, proceeding viâ Khiva and the Oxus, as a supporting flank-movement. Along either of these lines Russian corps may make an early advance for the purpose of skirmishing, causing disquiet, and weakening British prestige in Affghanistan; or even, in concert with Persia, of taking permanent possession of Herat, if we are so tardy in our movements as to allow of her doing so. But the real attack, the solid and deliberate charge which meditates no recoiling, will not be made by Russia until she have converted Persia into a vassal state, and efficiently organised her forces and resources. This she will seek to do by keeping the Shah on the throne, but subjecting the Persian army to Russian officers and drill, and pulling the wires of the puppet government from St Petersburg. The accomplishment of all this by Russia is, in our opinion, a mere question of time; and, once accomplished, it will be found that in absorbing Persia our great Asiatic rival has most formidably added to his strength. The Persian army at present consists of 80,000 infantry; an artillery which, like that of all Asiatic nations, is better than its infantry; and clouds of cavalry, that can perform marches of sixty or seventy miles a-day for several successive days, without inconvenience—thus being able to pass over tracts wholly impracticable to ordinary troops, and make most effective surprises. The raw material of the Persian army is excellent. “If regularly disciplined,” says Sir John M‘Neill, “and led by a competent number of European officers of intelligence and activity, there are few armies that, in a campaign in Asia, could boast of any great superiority over that of Persia. The men are singularly tractable, orderly, and obedient,—active, contented, and intelligent,—capable of enduring extraordinary fatigue and privations,—easily fed, and maintained at a moderate cost,—by no means wanting in courage or enterprise, and capable of perfect attachment to their officers,—in short, admirable materials for soldiers.” Such is the Power which Russia is moulding to her purposes,—over which she is likely immediately to get a still firmer hold,—and which will march by her side, or as a vanguard, in her onsets upon Affghanistan. So that, while a Russian corps advances from Astrabad as the base of its Trans-Caspian operations, the military forces of the Shah will advance from the heart of Persia, and both together march by contiguous and parallel routes to Herat.

From the Caspian to Herat is a distance of not quite six hundred miles. Part of this distance the Russians might travel by water, up the river Goorgan, and the still larger Attruck river,—both of which fall into the Caspian a little to the north of Astrabad, and the courses of which run due eastwards in the direction of Herat. Independently of these routes by water, which might be of use for nearly a third part of the way, three parallel lines of road lead through northern Khorassan to Herat. On all of these a scarcity of water, necessitating long marches, occurs at some points; but they are constantly travelled by the caravans, and have been repeatedly traversed by Persian armies and their artillery without difficulty. We could easily accumulate testimony, from the personal observations of Burnes, Conolly, M‘Neill, and Ferrier, to show that the region between the Caspian and Herat is no desert, that the food-supplies are sufficiently abundant, and the roads quite practicable for armies; but, not to speak of more ancient cases, we think the simple fact that Persian armies have repeatedly made the journey both backwards and forwards within the last thirty years, renders the tendering of such proof mere pedantry and supererogation. Let it suffice, then, to quote the compendious affirmation of Sir John M‘Neill, who, writing from Meshed, in the very heart of these routes, and speaking of the region to the east of Herat as well as to the west of it, says: “The country between the frontiers of Persia and India is far more productive than I had imagined it to be; and I can assure your lordship there is no impediment, either from the physical features of the country or from deficiency of supplies, to the march of a large army from the frontiers of Georgia to Candahar, or, as I believe, to the Indus.”

And so we reach Herat, by the main line of Russo-Persian attack. The other line of attack by which the Russians are advancing towards Affghanistan starts from the northern instead of the southern extremity of the Caspian, stretching across to the Aral Sea, making Khiva and its fertile oasis a base of operations, and thereafter ascending the great river Oxus to Balkh,—from whence a road leads due south, crossing the Hindoo Koosh at Bameean, to Cabool. In order to facilitate the crossing of the steppes between the Caspian and Aral Seas, the Russians have been slowly preparing three distinct routes for the march of troops. One of these ascends the course of the navigable river Yemba (which falls into the Caspian at its north-eastern corner), to a point where the river approaches the Aral Sea; and from that point there has been dug a line of wells, around which military colonies of Cossacks have been settled, across the steppe to the sea. These colonies of Cossacks, says M. Ferrier, “cultivate the surrounding soil, and create resources which never existed before; so that in a few years an army will be able to obtain sufficient food and forage in all their encampments, and will reach the Aral Sea without difficulty.” To the south of this line of wells lie two others,—one reaching from the river Ourloo Irghiz (a tributary of the Caspian), and tending towards the northern part of the Aral Sea; the other commencing from two points (Mangishlak and Dash-killeh) on the eastern shore of the Caspian, and uniting half-way in one line, which thence proceeds in the direction of Khiva, at the southern end of the Aral Sea. On the Aral, as on the Caspian, the Russians have already established a flotilla, which will serve to navigate the great Oxus river,—indeed, it is said that they even have steamers already plying upon that river. “The outposts of the Orenburg corps,” says a Russian letter, “extend to the very extremity of the country of Turan, upon the rivers Oxus and Jaxartes; and the military flotilla of the Sea of Aral is brought by the above-named rivers to the frontiers of India.” By this means the Russians will in due time advance south-eastwards up its course,—past Bokhara, which will fall, as Khiva has already fallen, under their domination—up to Balkh, where the Oxus ceases to be navigable, and which they must make a point d’appui before pushing southwards by the Bameean and five other more difficult passes to Cabool. It was by these passes through the Hindoo Koosh that Alexander, Baber, and Timour made their way into Affghanistan; but as the armies of the two latter were chiefly composed of Tartar horse, and that of the former had no artillery (though heavily baggaged), the success of their invasions is no test of the practicability of this route for a modern army; and it appears that, even if undefended, the Bameean passes are only traversable by a force armed with light or mountain artillery. As Russia, when she establishes herself at Balkh, will have the whole cavalry of Khiva, Bokhara, and the Turkomanian steppes on her side, it is obvious that the least slip made in the defence—the least opening left in the line of the Hindoo Koosh, would in such circumstances involve most embarrassing consequences to the defenders. Nevertheless it is equally obvious that such a quarter is ill suited to be made the object of the main attack, and that it is rather to be regarded as a flank movement subsidiary to, and in support of, the main line of Russo-Persian attack, viâ Astrabad and Meshed, against Herat.

One important object which, it seems to us, Russia has in advancing by Khiva and the Oxus, is the power which it will confer of winning or coercing the hardy tribes of Turkistan, which she will thus, as it were, catch in a net between her two lines of advance. Horses, cattle, and camels are the staple products of the region, and will thus be procured in great abundance; while the horsemen of the steppes, greedy of gain and fond of warlike adventure, would readily join in any enterprise against the regions of the south. For such auxiliaries, and even for a European corps, there is another route from the Oxus than that which leads to the Bameean passes of the Hindoo Koosh. Instead of proceeding all the way up the Oxus to Balkh, and thence crossing the mountains to Cabool, this other route leaves the banks of the Oxus at Charjooee (half-way between the Aral Sea and Balkh), and strikes due southwards by Merv to Herat. The desert between Charjooee and Merv was crossed by Burnes in 1832, and does not present the difficulties which he anticipated. It is crossed almost annually by the khans of Khiva and Bokhara, at the head of expeditions sometimes numbering ten or twelve thousand horse; and M. Ferrier, who believes this route practicable for an army, states, that in the winter and spring even the desert steppes are covered with sufficient herbage to meet the requirements of an army. From Charjooee to Merv is about 130 miles; from Merv to Herat, about 240,—in all, 370. But the difficulties of the route terminate at Merv, where there is a well-watered oasis; and from thence the expeditionary force could march along the banks of the Morghab river for nearly the whole way to Herat.

Thus, while flank-attacks might be made by the passes of the Hindoo Koosh upon Cabool, everything conspires to show that the main attack upon Affghanistan must take place by Herat. We have already described the importance of this place. “Herat,” said Captain Conolly, twenty-seven years ago, “could be made a place of considerable strength. Nothing can exceed the plenty and excellence of the supplies from the valley; and an army might be garrisoned there for years with every necessary within its reach.” That is just what the Russians will do with it, if ever it falls into their power. They will establish themselves there,—solidify their communications with the Caspian, by improving the roads and sinking wells,—push forward the sap of bribery and fair promises through Affghanistan, and excite disquiet and disaffection in India, until all things are ready for the grand assault and invasion. On the other hand, were Herat maintained by a British army, it would be almost impossible for either Persian or Russian to win a footing in its fertile valley. For it is one of the necessities of desert travelling, that an army can never march in a united body. It must advance in separate divisions, by different routes, or with intervals of one or more days’ march between each corps, from the difficulty of maintaining a large force at any one halting-place, and in order that the scanty wells may have time to refill themselves. The consequence is, that were an efficient force concentrated about Gorian, at the western extremity of the Herat valley, it could attack the invading army with decisive advantage as the wearied corps came up in succession, or by separate routes, from their thirsty march through northern Khorassan.

Other topics connected with the war in Asia invite attention, and may be treated of in a future article. It will suffice for the present to have directed attention to the slow and sure advance of a rival European Power towards our Indian “garden,”—to the circumstances out of which has arisen the present war with Persia—and the immense importance of Herat as the door of Affghanistan and key to the mountain-portals of our Indian empire. As to the merits of the war with Persia, we have clearly expressed ourselves. The grounds upon which our Government, in the proclamation of war, has justified a recourse to hostilities, are quite inadmissible; for they are founded upon a treaty which never was ratified. But, though wrong in its plea, the British Government was perfectly justified in having recourse to hostilities,—nay, more, it was imperatively called upon by the interests of the empire to take such a course. It is a strange misfortune that the treaty of 1853 was never ratified by the Aberdeen Government, and in such circumstances it was a grievous error of the present Government to found upon a document so obviously null. But the grand and simple justification of hostilities remains—namely, that apart from all conventions, if Persia choose to attack Affghanistan, we have an equal right to act in its defence; and that every principle of national interest concurred in urging us so to act. It will be a sad day for our Indian empire when Persia succeeds in establishing her power in Affghanistan.

As to the military measures of the Government, the least that we can say is that they have failed in warding off the most pressing danger. Not only Herat, but the whole western front of Affghanistan, embracing a third of the entire region, is in the hands of the Persians, who are doubtless consolidating their position there. The expedition to the Persian Gulf is a most important movement as regards ulterior results, but all the measures of actual defence for Affghanistan have been marked by a dilatoriness which has rendered them fruitless. The plan of the Government was, that a select band of officers should proceed to Herat to aid in its defence,—and had they gained that city in time it would have been saved; but although Herat held out much longer than was anticipated, the Persians were masters of it before the British officers had set out on their journey! Money and arms, too, were ordered by the Home Government to be transmitted to Dost Mahomed, in order that he might manœuvre to raise the siege; but so tardily was the resolution taken that even yet no news has arrived of these supplies having reached Candahar! The fact is, our Indian Government ought to have been left to deal with Persia when that Power makes any attack upon Affghanistan; for in no other way can the requisite celerity of movement be attained. An army from the Caspian can reach Herat before the news of its starting can reach England, and Herat be easily captured before an answer from Downing Street be received at Bombay! In truth, even with the entire direction of affairs committed to the Indian Government, the chances are, that our measures of defence will be taken too late. The frontier of the Indus is too distant from Herat to allow of our maintaining that watch over its independence which is imperatively demanded by a regard for the safety of India. In 1839 our army, including a short halt at Khelat, took from the 23d February to the 25th April to march from Shikarpoor on the Indus to Candahar—about sixty days, a period that would suffice to bring an army to Herat from the Caspian; and other four hundred miles intervene between Candahar and Herat. In fact, the journey from the Indus to Herat is fully a half longer than that from Astrabad to the same place. These facts suggest grave reflections, which we cannot enter upon at the close of an article. But let the Government and public of this country lay this to heart, that a Russian corps could be landed at Astrabad, and be far on its march to Herat, before any intelligence of the event could reach England, or even India; and that the presence of a couple of Russian brigades, and a few engineers of the Todleben school, could hold the earthen defences of Herat for years against any force which we could bring against it. Even if the present danger blow over, these are facts which demand the most earnest attention of the Government and our military authorities.

SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE.—NO. I.

THE SAD FORTUNES OF THE REVEREND AMOS BARTON.

PART II.—CHAPTER V.

The Rev. Amos Barton, whose sad fortunes I have undertaken to relate, was, you perceive, in no respect an ideal or exceptional character, and perhaps I am doing a bold thing to bespeak your sympathy on behalf of a man who was so very far from remarkable,—a man whose virtues were not heroic, and who had no undetected crime within his breast; who had not the slightest mystery hanging about him, but was palpably and unmistakably commonplace; who was not even in love, but had had that complaint favourably many years ago. “An utterly uninteresting character!” I think I hear a lady reader exclaim—Mrs Farthingale, for example, who prefers the ideal in fiction; to whom tragedy means ermine tippets, adultery, and murder; and comedy, the adventures of some personage who is “quite a character.”

But, my dear madam, it is so very large a majority of your fellow-countrymen that are of this insignificant stamp. At least eighty out of a hundred of your adult male fellow-Britons returned in the last census, are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. They are simply men of complexions more or less muddy, whose conversation is more or less bald and disjointed. Yet these commonplace people—many of them—bear a conscience, and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right; they have their unspoken sorrows, and their sacred joys; their hearts have perhaps gone out towards their first-born, and they have mourned over the irreclaimable dead. Nay, is there not a pathos in their very insignificance,—in our comparison of their dim and narrow existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which they share?

Depend upon it, my dear lady, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones. In that case, I should have no fear of your not caring to know what farther befell the Rev. Amos Barton, or of your thinking the homely details I have to tell at all beneath your attention. As it is, you can, if you please, decline to pursue my story farther; and you will easily find reading more to your taste, since I learn from the newspapers that many remarkable novels, full of striking situations, thrilling incidents, and eloquent writing, have appeared only within the last season.

Meanwhile, readers who have begun to feel an interest in the Rev. Amos Barton and his wife, will be glad to learn that Mr Oldinport lent the twenty pounds. But twenty pounds are soon exhausted when twelve are due as back payment to the butcher, and when the possession of eight extra sovereigns in February weather is an irresistible temptation to order a new greatcoat. And though Mr Bridmain so far departed from the necessary economy entailed on him by the Countess’s elegant toilette and expensive maid, as to choose a handsome black silk, stiff, as his experienced eye discerned, with the genuine strength of its own texture, and not with the factitious strength of gum, and present it to Mrs Barton, in retrieval of the accident that had occurred at his table, yet, dear me—as every husband has heard—what is the present of a gown, when you are deficiently furnished with the et-ceteras of apparel, and when, moreover, there are six children whose wear and tear of clothes is something incredible to the non-maternal mind?

Indeed, the equation of income and expenditure was offering new and constantly accumulating difficulties to Mr and Mrs Barton; for shortly after the birth of little Walter, Milly’s aunt, who had lived with her ever since her marriage, had withdrawn herself, her furniture, and her yearly income, to the household of another niece; prompted to that step, very probably, by a slight “tiff” with the Rev. Amos, which occurred while Milly was up-stairs, and proved one too many for the elderly lady’s patience and magnanimity. Mr Barton’s temper was a little warm, but, on the other hand, elderly maiden ladies are known to be susceptible; so we will not suppose that all the blame lay on his side—the less so, as he had every motive for humouring an inmate whose presence kept the wolf from the door. It was now nearly a year since Miss Jackson’s departure, and, to a fine ear, the howl of the wolf was audibly approaching.

It was a sad thing, too, that when the last snow had melted, when the purple and yellow crocuses were coming up in the garden, and the old church was already half pulled down, Milly had an illness which made her lips look pale, and rendered it absolutely necessary that she should not exert herself for some time. Mr Brand, the Shepperton doctor so obnoxious to Mr Pillgrim, ordered her to drink port-wine, and it was quite necessary to have a charwoman very often, to assist Nanny in all the extra work that fell upon her.

Mrs Hackit, who hardly ever paid a visit to any one but her oldest and nearest neighbour Mrs Patten, now took the unusual step of calling at the vicarage one morning; and the tears came into her unsentimental eyes as she saw Milly seated pale and feeble in the parlour, unable to persevere in sewing the pinafore that lay on the table beside her. Little Dickey, a boisterous boy of five, with large pink cheeks and sturdy legs, was having his turn to sit with Mamma, and was squatting quiet as a mouse at her knee, holding her soft white hand between his little red, black-nailed fists. He was a boy whom Mrs Hackit, in a severe mood, had pronounced “stocky” (a word that etymologically, in all probability, conveys some allusion to an instrument of punishment for the refractory); but seeing him thus subdued into goodness, she smiled at him with her kindest smile, and, stooping down, suggested a kiss—a favour which Dickey resolutely declined.

“Now do you take nourishing things anuff?” was one of Mrs Hackit’s first questions, and Milly endeavoured to make it appear that no woman was ever so much in danger of being over-fed and led into self-indulgent habits as herself. But Mrs Hackit gathered one fact from her replies, namely, that Mr Brand had ordered port-wine.

While this conversation was going forward, Dickey had been furtively stroking and kissing the soft white hand; so that at last, when a pause came, his mother said, smilingly, “Why are you kissing my hand, Dickey?”

“It id to yovely,” answered Dickey, who, you observe, was decidedly backward in his pronunciation.

Mrs Hackit remembered this little scene in after days, and thought with peculiar tenderness and pity of the “stocky boy.”

The next day there came a hamper with Mrs Hackit’s respects; and on being opened, it was found to contain half-a-dozen of port-wine and two couples of fowls. Mrs Farquhar, too, was very kind; insisted on Mrs Barton’s rejecting all arrow-root but hers, which was genuine Indian, and carried away Sophy and Fred to stay with her a fortnight. These and other good-natured attentions made the trouble of Milly’s illness more bearable; but they could not prevent it from swelling expenses, and Mr Barton began to have serious thoughts of representing his case to a certain charity for the relief of needy curates.

Altogether, as matters stood in Shepperton, the parishioners were more likely to have a strong sense that the clergyman needed their material aid, than that they needed his spiritual aid,—not the best state of things in this age and country, where faith in men solely on the ground of their spiritual gifts has considerably diminished, and especially unfavourable to the influence of the Rev. Amos, whose spiritual gifts would not have had a very commanding power even in an age of faith.

But, you ask, did not the Countess Czerlaski pay any attention to her friends all this time? To be sure she did. She was indefatigable in visiting her “sweet Milly,” and sitting with her for hours together; and it may seem remarkable to you that she neither thought of taking away any of the children, nor of providing for any of Milly’s probable wants; but ladies of rank and of luxurious habits, you know, cannot be expected to surmise the details of poverty. She put a great deal of eau-de-Cologne on Mrs Barton’s pocket-handkerchief, rearranged her pillow and footstool, kissed her cheeks, wrapped her in a soft warm shawl from her own shoulders, and amused her with stories of the life she had seen abroad. When Mr Barton joined them, she talked of Tractarianism, of her determination not to re-enter the vortex of fashionable life, and of her anxiety to see him in a sphere large enough for his talents. Milly thought her sprightliness and affectionate warmth quite charming, and was very fond of her; while the Rev. Amos had a vague consciousness that he had risen into aristocratic life, and only associated with his middle-class parishioners in a pastoral and parenthetic manner.

However, as the days brightened, Milly’s cheeks and lips brightened too; and in a few weeks she was almost as active as ever, though watchful eyes might have seen that activity was not easy to her. Mrs Hackit’s eyes were of that kind, and one day that Mr and Mrs Barton had been dining with her for the first time since Milly’s illness, she observed to her husband—“That poor thing’s dreadful weak an’ delicate, she won’t stan’ havin’ many more children.”

Mr Barton, meanwhile, had been indefatigable in his vocation. He had preached two extemporary sermons every Sunday at the workhouse, where a room had been fitted up for divine service, pending the alterations in the church; and had walked the same evening to a cottage at one or other extremity of his parish to deliver another sermon, still more extemporary, in an atmosphere impregnated with spring-flowers and perspiration. After all these labours you will easily conceive that he was considerably exhausted by half-past nine o’clock in the evening, and that a supper at a friendly parishioner’s, with a glass, or even two glasses, of brandy-and-water after it, was a welcome reinforcement. Mr Barton was not at all an ascetic; he thought the benefits of fasting were entirely confined to the Old Testament dispensation; he was fond of relaxing himself with a little gossip; indeed, Miss Bond, and other ladies of enthusiastic views, sometimes regretted that Mr Barton did not more uninterruptedly exhibit a superiority to the things of the flesh. Thin ladies, who take little exercise, and whose livers are not strong enough to bear stimulants, are so extremely critical about one’s personal habits! And, after all, the Rev. Amos never came near the borders of a vice. His very faults were middling—he was not very ungrammatical. It was not in his nature to be superlative in anything; unless, indeed, he was superlatively middling, the quintessential extract of mediocrity. If there was any one point on which he showed an inclination to be excessive, it was confidence in his own shrewdness and ability in practical matters, so that he was very full of plans which were something like his moves in chess—admirably well calculated, supposing the state of the case were otherwise. For example, that notable plan of introducing anti-dissenting books into his lending library did not in the least appear to have bruised the head of Dissent, though it had certainly made Dissent strongly inclined to bite the Rev. Amos’s heel. Again, he vexed the souls of his churchwardens and influential parishioners by his fertile suggestiveness as to what it would be well for them to do in the matter of the church repairs, and other ecclesiastical secularities.

“I never see the like to parsons,” Mr Hackit said one day in conversation with his brother churchwarden Mr Bond; “they’re al’ys for meddlin’ wi’ business, an’ they know no moor about it than my black filly.”

“Ah,” said Mr Bond, “they’re too high learnt to have much common-sense.”

“Well,” remarked Mr Hackit, in a modest and dubious tone, as if throwing out a hypothesis which might be considered bold, “I should say that’s a bad sort o’ eddication as makes folks onreasonable.”

So that, you perceive, Mr Barton’s popularity was in that precarious condition, in that toppling and contingent state, in which a very slight push from a malignant destiny would utterly upset it. That push was not long in being given, as you shall hear.

One fine May morning, when Amos was out on his parochial visits, and the sunlight was streaming through the bow-window of the sitting-room, where Milly was seated at her sewing, occasionally looking up to glance at the children playing in the garden, there came a loud rap at the door, which she at once recognised as the Countess’s, and that well-dressed lady presently entered the sitting-room, with her veil drawn over her face. Milly was not at all surprised or sorry to see her; but when the Countess threw up her veil, and showed that her eyes were red and swollen, she was both surprised and sorry.

“What can be the matter, dear Caroline?”

Caroline threw down Jet, who gave a little yelp; then she threw her arms round Milly’s neck, and began to sob; then she threw herself on the sofa, and begged for a glass of water; then she threw off her bonnet and shawl; and, by the time Milly’s imagination had exhausted itself in conjuring up calamities, she said—

“Dear, how shall I tell you? I am the most wretched woman. To be deceived by a brother to whom I have been so devoted—to see him degrading himself—giving himself utterly to the dogs!”

“What can it be?” said Milly, who began to picture to herself the sober Mr Bridmain taking to brandy and betting.

“He is going to be married—to marry my own maid, that deceitful Alice, to whom I have been the most indulgent mistress. Did you ever hear of anything so disgraceful? so mortifying? so disreputable?”

“And has he only just told you of it?” said Milly, who, having really heard of worse conduct, even in her innocent life, avoided a direct answer.

“Told me of it! he had not even the grace to do that. I went into the dining-room suddenly and found him kissing her—disgusting at his time of life, is it not?—and when I reproved her for allowing such liberties, she turned round saucily, and said she was engaged to be married to my brother, and she saw no shame in allowing him to kiss her. Edmund is a miserable coward, you know, and looked frightened; but when she asked him to say whether it was not so, he tried to summon up courage and say yes. I left the room in disgust, and this morning I have been questioning Edmund, and find that he is bent on marrying this woman, and that he has been putting off telling me—because he was ashamed of himself, I suppose. I couldn’t possibly stay in the house after this, with my own maid turned mistress. And now, Milly, I am come to throw myself on your charity for a week or two. Will you take me in?”

“That we will,” said Milly, “if you will only put up with our poor rooms and way of living. It will be delightful to have you!”

“It will soothe me to be with you and Mr Barton a little while. I feel quite unable to go among my other friends just at present. What those two wretched people will do I don’t know—leave the neighbourhood at once, I hope. I entreated my brother to do so, before he disgraced himself.”

When Amos came home, he joined his cordial welcome and sympathy to Milly’s. By-and-by the Countess’s formidable boxes, which she had carefully packed before her indignation drove her away from Camp Villa, arrived at the vicarage, and were deposited in the spare bedroom, and in two closets, not spare, which Milly emptied for their reception. A week afterwards, the excellent apartments at Camp Villa, comprising dining and drawing rooms, three bedrooms and a dressing-room, were again to let, and Mr Bridmain’s sudden departure, together with the Countess Czerlaski’s installation as a visitor at Shepperton Vicarage, became a topic of general conversation in the neighbourhood. The keen-sighted virtue of Millby and Shepperton saw in all this a confirmation of its worst suspicions, and pitied the Rev. Amos Barton’s gullibility.

But when week after week, and month after month, slipped by without witnessing the Countess’s departure—when summer and harvest had fled, and still left her behind them occupying the spare bedroom and the closets, and also a large proportion of Mrs Barton’s time and attention, new surmises of a very evil kind were added to the old rumours, and began to take the form of settled convictions in the minds even of Mr Barton’s most friendly parishioners.

And now, here is an opportunity for an accomplished writer to apostrophise calumny, to quote Virgil, and to show that he is acquainted with the most ingenious things which have been said on that subject in polite literature.

But what is opportunity to the man who can’t use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity. So, as my memory is ill-furnished, and my note-book still worse, I am unable to show myself either erudite or eloquent à propos of the calumny whereof the Rev. Amos Barton was the victim. I can only ask my reader, did you ever upset your ink-bottle, and watch, in helpless agony, the rapid spread of Stygian blackness over your fair manuscript or fairer table-cover? With a like inky swiftness did gossip now blacken the reputation of the Rev. Amos Barton, causing the unfriendly to scorn and even the friendly to stand aloof, at a time when difficulties of another kind were fast thickening around him.

CHAPTER VI.

One November morning, at least six months after the Countess Czerlaski had taken up her residence at the vicarage, Mrs Hackit heard that her neighbour Mrs Patten had an attack of her old complaint, vaguely called “the spasms.” Accordingly, about eleven o’clock, she put on her velvet bonnet and cloth cloak, with a long boa and a muff large enough to stow a prize baby in; for Mrs Hackit regulated her costume by the calendar, and brought out her furs on the first of November, whatever might be the temperature. She was not a woman weakly to accommodate herself to shilly-shally proceedings. If the season didn’t know what it ought to do, Mrs Hackit did. In her best days, it was always sharp weather at “Gunpowder Plot,” and she didn’t like new fashions.

And this morning the weather was very rationally in accordance with her costume, for as she made her way through the fields to Cross Farm, the yellow leaves on the hedge-girt elms, which showed bright and golden against the low-hanging purple clouds, were being scattered across the grassy path by the coldest of November winds. “Ah,” Mrs Hackit thought to herself, “I dare say we shall have a sharp pinch this winter, and if we do, I shouldn’t wonder if it takes the old lady off. They say a green Yule makes a fat churchyard; but so does a white Yule too, for that matter. When the stool’s rotten enough, no matter who sits on’t.”

However, on her arrival at Cross Farm, the prospect of Mrs Patten’s decease was again thrown into the dim distance in her imagination, for Miss Janet Gibbs met her with the news that Mrs Patten was much better, and led her, without any preliminary announcement, to the old lady’s bedroom. Janet had scarcely reached the end of her circumstantial narrative how the attack came on and what were her aunt’s sensations—a narrative to which Mrs Patten, in her neatly plaited night-cap, seemed to listen with a contemptuous resignation to her niece’s historical inaccuracy, contenting herself with occasionally confounding Janet by a shake of the head—when the clatter of a horse’s hoofs on the yard pavement announced the arrival of Mr Pillgrim, whose large, top-booted person presently made its appearance up-stairs. He found Mrs Patten going on so well that there was no need to look solemn. He might glide from condolence into gossip without offence, and the temptation of having Mrs Hackit’s ear was irresistible.

“What a disgraceful business this is turning out of your parson’s,” was the remark with which he made this agreeable transition, throwing himself back in the chair from which he had been leaning towards the patient.

“Eh, dear me!” said Mrs Hackit, “disgraceful enough. I stuck to Mr Barton as long as I could, for his wife’s sake; but I can’t countenance such goings on. It’s hateful to see that woman coming with ’em to service of a Sunday, and if Mr Hackit wasn’t churchwarden and I didn’t think it wrong to forsake one’s own parish, I should go to Knebley church. There’s a many parish’ners as do.”

“I used to think Barton was only a fool,” observed Mr Pillgrim, in a tone which implied that he was conscious of having been weakly charitable. “I thought he was imposed upon and led away by those people when they first came. But that’s impossible now.”

“O, it’s as plain as the nose in your face,” said Mrs Hackit, unreflectingly, not perceiving the equivoque in her comparison,—“coming to Millby, like a sparrow perchin’ on a bough, as I may say, with her brother, as she called him; and then, all on a sudden, the brother goes off wi’ himself, and she throws herself on the Bartons. Though what could make her take up wi’ a poor notomise of a parson, as hasn’t got enough to keep wife and children, there’s one above knows—I don’t.”

“Mr Barton may have attractions we don’t know of,” said Mr Pillgrim, who piqued himself on a talent for sarcasm. “The Countess has no maid now, and they say Mr Barton is handy in assisting at her toilette—laces her boots, and so forth.”

“Tilette, be fiddled!” said Mrs Hackit, with indignant boldness of metaphor; “an’ there’s that poor thing a-sewing her fingers to the bone for them children—an’ another comin’ on. What she must have to go through! It goes to my heart to turn my back on her. But she’s i’ the wrong to let herself be put upon a’ that manner.”

“Ah! I was talking to Mrs Farquhar about that the other day. She said, ‘I think Mrs Barton a v-e-r-y w-e-a-k w-o-m-a-n.’” (Mr Pillgrim gave this quotation with slow emphasis, as if he thought Mrs Farquhar had uttered a remarkable sentiment.) “They find it impossible to invite her to their house while she has that equivocal person staying with her.”

“Well!” remarked Miss Gibbs, “if I was a wife, nothing should induce me to bear what Mrs Barton does.”

“Yes, it’s fine talking,” said Mrs Patten, from her pillow; “old maids’ husbands are al’ys well-managed. If you was a wife you’d be as foolish as your betters, belike.”

“All my wonder is,” observed Mrs Hackit, “how the Bartons make both ends meet. You may depend on’t she’s got nothing to give ’em; for I understand as he’s been havin’ money from some clergy charity. They said at first as she stuffed Mr Barton wi’ notions about her writing to the Chancellor an’ her fine friends to give him a living. Howiver, I don’t know what’s true an’ what’s false. Mr Barton keeps away from our house now, for I gave him a bit o’ my mind one day. Maybe he’s ashamed of himself. He seems to me to look dreadful thin an’ harassed of a Sunday.”

“O, he must be aware he’s getting into bad odour everywhere. The clergy are quite disgusted with his folly. They say Carpe would be glad to get Barton out of the curacy if he could; but he can’t do that without coming to Shepperton himself, as Barton’s a licensed curate; and he wouldn’t like that, I suppose.”

At this moment Mrs Patten showed signs of uneasiness, which recalled Mr Pillgrim to professional attentions; and Mrs Hackit, observing that it was Thursday, and she must see after the butter, said good-by, promising to look in again soon, and bring her knitting.

This Thursday, by the by, is the first in the month—the day on which the clerical meeting is held at Millby Vicarage; and as the Rev. Amos Barton has reasons for not attending, he will very likely be a subject of conversation amongst his clerical brethren. Suppose we go there, and hear whether Mr Pillgrim has reported their opinion correctly.

There is not a numerous party to-day, for it is a season of sore throats and catarrhs; so that the exegetical and theological discussions, which are the preliminary of dining, have not been quite so spirited as usual; and although a question relative to the Epistle of Jude has not been quite cleared up, the striking of six by the church clock, and the simultaneous announcement of dinner, are sounds that no one feels to be importunate.

Pleasant (when one is not in the least bilious) to enter a comfortable dining-room, where the closely-drawn red curtains glow with the double light of fire and candle, where glass and silver are glittering on the pure damask, and a soup-tureen gives a hint of the fragrance that will presently rush out to inundate your hungry senses, and prepare them, by the delicate visitation of atoms, for the keen gusto of ampler contact! Especially if you have confidence in the dinner-giving capacity of your host—if you know that he is not a man who entertains grovelling views of eating and drinking as a mere satisfaction of hunger and thirst, and, dead to all the finer influences of the palate, expects his guests to be brilliant on ill-flavoured gravies and the cheapest Marsala. Mr Ely was particularly worthy of such confidence, and his virtues as an Amphitryon had probably contributed quite as much as the central situation of Millby to the selection of his house as a clerical rendezvous. He looks particularly graceful at the head of his table, and, indeed, on all occasions where he acts as president or moderator—a man who seems to listen well, and is an excellent amalgam of discrepant ingredients.

At the other end of the table, as “Vice,” sits Mr Fellowes, rector and magistrate, a man of imposing appearance, with a mellifluous voice, and the readiest of tongues. Mr Fellowes once obtained a living by the persuasive charms of his conversation, and the fluency with which he interpreted the opinions of an obese and stammering baronet, so as to give that elderly gentleman a very pleasing perception of his own wisdom. Mr Fellowes is a very successful man, and has the highest character everywhere except in his own parish, where, doubtless, because his parishioners happen to be quarrelsome people, he is always at fierce feud with a farmer or two, a colliery proprietor, a grocer who was once churchwarden, and a tailor who formerly officiated as clerk.

At Mr Ely’s right hand you see a very small man with a sallow and somewhat puffy face, whose hair is brushed straight up, evidently with the intention of giving him a height somewhat less disproportionate to his sense of his own importance than the measure of five feet three accorded him by an oversight of nature. This is the Rev. Archibald Duke, a very dyspeptic and evangelical man, who takes the gloomiest view of mankind and their prospects, and thinks the immense sale of the “Pickwick Papers,” recently completed, one of the strongest proofs of original sin. Unfortunately, though Mr Duke was not burdened, with a family, his yearly expenditure was apt considerably to exceed his income; and the unpleasant circumstances resulting from this, together with heavy meat breakfasts, may probably have contributed to his desponding views of the world generally.

Next to him is seated Mr Furness, a tall young man, with blond hair and whiskers, who was plucked at Cambridge entirely owing to his genius; at least, I know that he soon afterwards published a volume of poems, which were considered remarkably beautiful by many young ladies of his acquaintance. Mr Furness preached his own sermons, as any one of tolerable critical acumen might have certified by comparing them with his poems: in both, there was an exuberance of metaphor and simile entirely original, and not in the least borrowed from any resemblance in the things compared.

On Mr Furness’s left you see Mr Pugh, another young curate, of much less marked characteristics. He had not published any poems; he had not even been plucked; he had neat black whiskers and a pale complexion; read prayers and a sermon twice every Sunday, and might be seen any day sallying forth on his parochial duties in a white tie, a well-brushed hat, a perfect suit of black, and well-polished boots—an equipment which he probably supposed hieroglyphically to represent the spirit of Christianity to the parishioners of Whittlecombe.

Mr Pugh’s vis-à-vis is the Rev. Martin Cleves, a man about forty—middle-sized, broad-shouldered, with a negligently tied cravat, large irregular features, and a large head, thickly covered with lanky brown hair. To a superficial glance, Mr Cleves is the plainest and least clerical looking of the party; yet, strange to say, there is the true parish priest, the pastor beloved, consulted, relied on by his flock; a clergyman who is not associated with the undertaker, but thought of as the surest helper under a difficulty, as a monitor who is encouraging rather than severe. Mr Cleves has the wonderful art of preaching sermons which the wheelwright and the blacksmith can understand, not because he talks condescending twaddle, but because he can call a spade a spade, and knows how to disencumber ideas of their wordy frippery. Look at him more attentively and you will see that his face is a very interesting one—that there is a great deal of humour and feeling playing in his grey eyes, and about the corners of his roughly cut mouth:—a man, you observe, who has most likely sprung from the harder working section of the middle class, and has hereditary sympathies with the checkered life of the people. He gets together the working men in his parish on a Monday evening, and gives them a sort of conversational lecture on useful practical matters, telling them stories, or reading some select passages from an agreeable book, and commenting on them; and if you were to ask the first labourer or artisan in Tripplegate what sort of man the parson was, he would say,—“a uncommon knowing, sensible, free-spoken gentleman; very kind an’ good-natur’d too.” Yet for all this, he is perhaps the best Grecian of the party, if we except Mr Baird, the young man on his left.

Mr Baird has since gained considerable celebrity as an original writer and metropolitan lecturer, but at that time he used to preach in a little church something like a barn, to a congregation consisting of three rich farmers and their servants, about fifteen labourers, and the due proportion of women and children. The rich farmers understood him to be “very high learnt;” but if you had interrogated them for a more precise description, they would have said that he was “a thinnish-faced man, with a sort o’ cast in his eye, like.”

Seven, altogether: a delightful number for a dinner party, supposing the units to be delightful, but everything depends on that. During dinner, Mr Fellowes took the lead in the conversation, which set strongly in the direction of mangold-wurzel and the rotation of crops; for Mr Fellowes and Mr Cleves cultivated their own glebes. Mr Ely, too, had some agricultural notions, and even the Rev. Archibald Duke was made alive to that class of mundane subjects by the possession of some potato ground. The two young curates talked a little aside during these discussions, which had imperfect interest for their unbeneficed minds; and the transcendental and near-sighted Mr Baird seemed to listen somewhat abstractedly, knowing little more of potatoes and mangold-wurzel than that they were some form of the “Conditioned.”

“What a hobby farming is with Lord Watling!” said Mr Fellowes, when the cloth was being drawn. “I went over his farm at Tetterley with him last summer. It is really a model farm; first-rate dairy, grazing and wheat land, and such splendid farm-buildings! An expensive hobby, though. He sinks a good deal of money there, I fancy. He has a great whim for black cattle, and he sends that drunken old Scotch bailiff of his to Scotland every year, with hundreds in his pocket, to buy these beasts.”

“By the by,” said Mr Ely, “do you know who is the man to whom Lord Watling has given the Bramhill living?”

“A man named Sargent. I knew him at Oxford. His brother is a lawyer, and was very useful to Lord Watling in that ugly Brounsell affair. That’s why Sargent got the living.”

“Sargent,” said Mr Ely. “I know him. Isn’t he a showy, talkative fellow; has written travels in Mesopotamia, or something of that sort?”

“That’s the man.”

“He was at Witherington once, as Bagshawe’s curate. He got into rather bad odour there, through some scandal about a flirtation, I think.”

“Talking of scandal,” returned Mr Fellowes, “have you heard the last story about Barton? Nisbett was telling me the other day that he dines alone with the Countess at six, while Mrs Barton is in the kitchen acting as cook.”

“Rather an apocryphal authority, Nisbett,” said Mr Ely.

“Ah,” said Mr Cleves, with good-natured humour twinkling in his eyes, “depend upon it, that is a corrupt version. The original text is, that they all dined together with six—meaning six children—and that Mrs Barton is an excellent cook.”

“I wish dining alone together may be the worst of that sad business,” said the Rev. Archibald Duke, in a tone implying that his wish was a strong figure of speech.

“Well,” said Mr Fellowes, filling his glass and looking jocose, “Barton is certainly either the greatest gull in existence, or he has some cunning secret,—some philtre or other, to make himself charming in the eyes of a fair lady. It isn’t all of us that can make conquests when our ugliness is past its bloom.”

“The lady seemed to have made a conquest of him at the very outset,” said Mr Ely. “I was immensely amused one night at Granby’s, when he was telling us her story about her husband’s adventures. He said, ‘When she told me the tale, I felt I don’t know how,—I felt it from the crown of my head to the sole of my feet.’”

Mr Ely gave these words dramatically, imitating the Rev. Amos’s fervour and symbolic action, and every one laughed, except Mr Duke, whose after-dinner view of things was not apt to be jovial. He said:

“I think some of us ought to remonstrate with Mr Barton on the scandal he is causing. He is not only imperilling his own soul, but the souls of his flock.”

“Depend upon it,” said Mr Cleves, “there is some simple explanation of the whole affair, if we only happened to know it. Barton has always impressed me as a right-minded man, who has the knack of doing himself injustice by his manner.”

“Now I never liked Barton,” said Mr Fellowes. “He’s not a gentleman. Why, he used to be on terms of intimacy with that canting Prior, who died a little while ago;—a fellow who soaked himself with spirits, and talked of the Gospel through an inflamed nose.”

“The Countess has given him more refined tastes, I dare say,” said Mr Ely.

“Well,” observed Mr Cleves, “the poor fellow must have a hard pull to get along, with his small income and large family. Let us hope the Countess does something towards making the pot boil.”

“Not she,” said Mr Duke; “there are greater signs of poverty about them than ever.”

“Well, come,” returned Mr Cleves, who could be caustic sometimes, and who was not at all fond of his reverend brother Mr Duke, “that’s something in Barton’s favour at all events. He might be poor without showing signs of poverty.”

“Mr Duke turned rather yellow, which was his way of blushing, and Mr Ely came to his relief by observing:

“They’re making a very good piece of work of Shepperton Church. Dolby, the architect, who has it in hand, is a very clever fellow.”

“It’s he who has been doing Coppleton Church,” said Mr Furness. “They’ve got it in excellent order for the visitation.”

This mention of the visitation suggested the Bishop, and thus opened a wide duct, which entirely diverted the stream of animadversion from that small pipe—that capillary vessel, the Rev. Amos Barton.

The talk of the clergy about their Bishop belongs to the esoteric part of their profession; so we will at once quit the dining-room at Millby Vicarage, lest we should happen to overhear remarks unsuited to the lay understanding, and perhaps dangerous to our repose of mind.

CHAPTER VII.

I dare say the long residence of the Countess Czerlaski at Shepperton Vicarage is very puzzling to you also, dear reader, as well as to Mr Barton’s clerical brethren; the more so, as I hope you are not in the least inclined to put that very evil interpretation on it which evidently found acceptance with the sallow and dyspeptic Mr Duke, and with the florid and highly peptic Mr Fellowes. You have seen enough, I trust, of the Rev. Amos Barton, to be convinced that he was more apt to fall into a blunder than into a sin—more apt to be deceived than to incur a necessity for being deceitful: and if you have a keen eye for physiognomy, you will have detected that the Countess Czerlaski loved herself far too well to get entangled in an unprofitable vice.

How, then, you will say, could this fine lady choose to quarter herself on the establishment of a poor curate, where the carpets were probably falling into holes, where the attendance was limited to a maid of all work, and where six children were running loose from eight o’clock in the morning till eight o’clock in the evening? Surely you must be misrepresenting the facts.

Heaven forbid! For not having a fertile imagination, as you perceive, and being unable to invent thrilling incidents for your amusement, my only merit must lie in the faithfulness with which I represent to you the humble experience of an ordinary fellow-mortal. I wish to stir your sympathy with commonplace troubles—to win your tears for real sorrow: sorrow such as may live next door to you—such as walks neither in rags nor in velvet, but in very ordinary decent apparel.

Therefore, that you may dismiss your suspicions of my veracity, I will beg you to consider, that at the time the Countess Czerlaski left Camp Villa in dudgeon, she had only twenty pounds in her pocket, being about one-third of the income she possessed independently of her brother. You will then perceive that she was in the extremely inconvenient predicament of having quarrelled, not indeed with her bread and cheese, but certainly with her chicken and tart—a predicament all the more inconvenient to her, because the habit of idleness had quite unfitted her for earning those necessary superfluities, and because, with all her fascinations, she had not secured any enthusiastic friends whose houses were open to her, and who were dying to see her. Thus she had completely checkmated herself, unless she could resolve on one unpleasant move—namely, to humble herself to her brother, and recognise his wife. This seemed quite impossible to her as long as she entertained the hope that he would make the first advances; and in this flattering hope she remained month after month at Shepperton Vicarage, gracefully overlooking the deficiencies of accommodation, and feeling that she was really behaving charmingly. “Who, indeed,” she thought to herself, “could do otherwise with a lovely, gentle creature like Milly? I shall really be sorry to leave the poor thing.”

So, though she lay in bed till ten, and came down to a separate breakfast at eleven, she kindly consented to dine as early as five, when a hot joint was prepared, which coldly furnished forth the children’s table the next day; she considerately prevented Milly from devoting herself too closely to the children, by insisting on reading, talking, and walking with her; and she even began to embroider a cap for the next baby, which must certainly be a girl, and be named Caroline.

After the first month or two of her residence at the Vicarage, the Rev. Amos Barton became aware—as, indeed, it was unavoidable that he should—of the strong disapprobation it drew upon him, and the change of feeling towards him which it was producing in his kindest parishioners. But, in the first place, he still believed in the Countess as a charming and influential woman, disposed to befriend him, and, in any case, he could hardly hint departure to a lady guest who had been kind to him and his, and who might any day spontaneously announce the termination of her visit; in the second place, he was conscious of his own innocence, and felt some contemptuous indignation towards people who were ready to imagine evil of him; and, lastly, he had, as I have already intimated, a strong will of his own, so that a certain obstinacy and defiance mingled itself with his other feelings on the subject.

The one unpleasant consequence which was not to be evaded or counteracted by any mere mental state, was the increasing drain on his slender purse for household expenses, to meet which the remittance he had received from the clerical charity threatened to be quite inadequate. Slander may be defeated by equanimity; but courageous thoughts will not pay your baker’s bill, and fortitude is nowhere considered legal tender for beef. Month after month the financial aspect of the Rev. Amos’s affairs became more and more serious to him, and month after month, too, wore away more and more of that armour of indignation and defiance with which he had at first defended himself from the harsh looks of faces that were once the friendliest.

But quite the heaviest pressure of the trouble fell on Milly—on gentle, uncomplaining Milly—whose delicate body was becoming daily less fit for all the many things that had to be done between rising up and lying down. At first, she thought the Countess’s visit would not last long, and she was quite glad to incur extra exertion for the sake of making her friend comfortable. I can hardly bear to think of all the rough work she did with those lovely hands—all by the sly, without letting her husband know anything about it, and husbands are not clairvoyant—how she salted bacon, ironed shirts and cravats, put patches on patches, and redarned darns. Then there was the task of mending and eking out baby linen in prospect, and the problem perpetually suggesting itself how she and Nanny should manage when there was another baby, as there would be before very many months were past.

When time glided on, and the Countess’s visit did not end, Milly was not blind to any phase of their position. She knew of the slander; she was aware of the keeping aloof of old friends; but these she felt almost entirely on her husband’s account. A loving woman’s world lies within the four walls of her own home; and it is only through her husband that she is in any electric communication with the world beyond. Mrs Simpkins may have looked scornfully at her, but baby crows and holds out his little arms none the less blithely; Mrs Tomkins may have left off calling on her, but her husband comes home none the less to receive her care and caresses; it has been wet and gloomy out of doors to-day, but she has looked well after the shirt buttons, has cut out baby’s pinafores, and half finished Willy’s blouse.

So it was with Milly. She was only vexed that her husband should be vexed—only wounded because he was misconceived. But the difficulty about ways and means she felt in quite a different manner. Her rectitude was alarmed lest they should have to make tradesmen wait for their money; her motherly love dreaded the diminution of comforts for the children, and the sense of her own failing health gave exaggerated force to these fears.

Milly could no longer shut her eyes to the fact, that the Countess was inconsiderate, if she did not allow herself to entertain severer thoughts; and she began to feel that it would soon be a duty to tell her frankly that they really could not afford to have her visit farther prolonged. But a process was going forward in two other minds, which ultimately saved Milly from having to perform this painful task.

In the first place, the Countess was getting weary of Shepperton—weary of waiting for her brother’s overtures which never came; so, one fine morning, she reflected that forgiveness was a Christian duty, that a sister should be placable, that Mr Bridmain must feel the need of her advice, to which he had been accustomed for three years, and that very likely “that woman” didn’t make the poor man happy. In this amiable frame of mind she wrote a very affectionate appeal, and addressed it to Mr Bridmain, through his banker.

Another mind that was being wrought up to a climax was Nanny’s, the maid of all work, who had a warm heart and a still warmer temper. Nanny adored her mistress: she had been heard to say, that she was “ready to kiss the ground as the missis trod on;” and Walter, she considered, was her baby, of whom she was as jealous as a lover. But she had from the first very slight admiration for the Countess Czerlaski. That lady, from Nanny’s point of view, was a personage always “drawed out i’ fine clothes,” the chief result of whose existence was to cause additional bed-making, carrying of hot water, laying of table-cloths and cooking of dinners. It was a perpetually heightening “aggravation” to Nanny that she and her mistress had to “slave” more than ever, because there was this fine lady in the house.

“An’ she pays nothin’ for’t neither,” observed Nanny to Mr Jacob Tomms, a young gentleman in the tailoring line, who occasionally—simply out of a taste for dialogue—looked into the vicarage kitchen of an evening. “I know the master’s shorter o’ money than iver, an’ it maks no end o’ difference i’ th’ housekeepin’—her bein’ here, besides bein’ obliged to have a charwoman constant.”

“There’s fine stories i’ the village about her,” said Mr Tomms. “They say as Muster Barton’s great wi’ her, or else she’d niver stop here.”

“Then they say a passill o’ lies, an’ you ought to be ashamed to goo an’ tell ’em o’er again. Do you think as the master as has got a wife like the missis, ‘ud goo runnin’ arter a stuck up piece o’ goods like that Countess, as isn’t fit to black the missis’s shoes? I’m none so fond o’ the master, but I know better on him nor that.”

“Well, I didn’t b’lieve it,” said Mr Tomms, humbly.

“B’lieve it? you’d ha’ been a ninny if yer did. An’ she’s a nasty stingy thing, that Countess. She’s niver giv me a sixpence or an old rag either, sin’ here she’s been. A-lyin’ a bed an’ a-comin’ down to breakfast when other folks wants their dinner!”

If such was the state of Nanny’s mind as early as the end of August, when this dialogue with Mr Tomms occurred, you may imagine what it must have been by the beginning of November, and that at that time a very slight spark might any day cause the long smouldering anger to flame forth in open indignation.

That spark happened to fall the very morning that Mrs Hackit paid the visit to Mrs Patten, recorded in the last chapter. Nanny’s dislike of the Countess extended to the innocent dog Jet, whom she “couldn’t a-bear to see made a fuss wi’ like a Christian. An’ the little ouzle must be washed, too, ivery Saturday, as if there wasn’t children enoo to wash, wi’out washin’ dogs.”

Now this particular morning it happened that Milly was quite too poorly to get up, and Mr Barton observed to Nanny, on going out, that he would call and tell Mr Brand to come. These circumstances were already enough to make Nanny anxious and susceptible. But the Countess, comfortably ignorant of them, came down as usual about eleven o’clock to her separate breakfast, which stood ready for her at that hour in the parlour; the kettle singing on the hob that she might make her own tea. There was a little jug of cream, taken according to custom from last night’s milk, and specially saved for the Countess’s breakfast. Jet always awaited his mistress at her bedroom door, and it was her habit to carry him down stairs.

“Now, my little Jet,” she said, putting him down gently on the hearth-rug, “you shall have a nice, nice breakfast.”

Jet indicated that he thought that observation extremely pertinent and well-timed, by immediately raising himself on his hind-legs, and the Countess emptied the cream-jug into the saucer. Now there was usually a small jug of milk standing on the tray by the side of the cream, and destined for Jet’s breakfast, but this morning Nanny, being “moithered,” had forgotten that part of the arrangements, so that when the Countess had made her tea, she perceived there was no second jug, and rang the bell. Nanny appeared, looking very red and heated—the fact was, she had been “doing up” the kitchen fire, and that is a sort of work which by no means conduces to blandness of temper.

“Nanny, you have forgotten Jet’s milk; will you bring me some more cream, please?”

This was just a little too much for Nanny’s forbearance.

“Yes, I dare say. Here am I wi’ my hands full o’ the children an’ the dinner, and missis ill a-bed, and Mr Brand a-comin’; and I must run o’er the village to get more cream, because you’ve giv it to that nasty little blackamoor.”

“Is Mrs Barton ill?”

“Ill—yes—I should think she is ill, an’ much you care. She’s likely to be ill, moithered as she is from mornin’ to night, wi’ folks as had better be elsewhere.”

“What do you mean by behaving in this way?”

“Mean? Why, I mean as the missis is a slavin’ her life out an’ a-sittin’ up o’ nights, for folks as are better able to wait of her, i’stid o’ lyin’ a-bed an’ doin’ nothin’ all the blessed day, but mek work.”

“Leave the room, and don’t be insolent.”

“Insolent! I’d better be insolent than like what some folks is,—a-livin’ on other folks, an’ bringin’ a bad name on ’em into the bargain.”

Here Nanny flung out of the room, leaving the lady to digest this unexpected breakfast at her leisure.

The Countess was stunned for a few minutes, but when she began to recall Nanny’s words, there was no possibility of avoiding very unpleasant conclusions from them, or of failing to see her position at the Vicarage in an entirely new light. The interpretation too of Nanny’s allusion to a “bad name” did not lie out of the reach of the Countess’s imagination, and she saw the necessity of quitting Shepperton without delay. Still, she would like to wait for her brother’s letter—no—she would ask Milly to forward it to her—still better, she would go at once to London, inquire her brother’s address at his banker’s, and go to see him without preliminary.

She went up to Milly’s room, and, after kisses and inquiries, said—“I find, on consideration, dear Milly, from the letter I had yesterday, that I must bid you good-by and go up to London at once. But you must not let me leave you ill, you naughty thing.”

“O no,” said Milly, who felt as if a load had been taken off her back, “I shall be very well in an hour or two. Indeed, I’m much better now. You will want me to help you to pack. But you won’t go for two or three days?”

“Yes, I must go to-morrow. But I shall not let you help me pack, so don’t entertain any unreasonable projects, but lie still. Mr Brand is coming, Nanny says.”

The news was not an unpleasant surprise to Mr Barton when he came home, though he was able to express more regret at the idea of parting than Milly could summon to her lips. He retained more of his original feeling for the Countess than Milly did, for women never betray themselves to men as they do to each other; and the Rev. Amos had not a keen instinct for character. But he felt that he was being relieved from a difficulty, and in the way that was easiest for him. Neither he nor Milly suspected that it was Nanny who had cut the knot for them, for the Countess took care to give no sign on that subject. As for Nanny, she was perfectly aware of the relation between cause and effect in the affair, and secretly chuckled over her outburst of “sauce,” as the best morning’s work she had ever done.

So on Friday morning, a fly was seen standing at the Vicarage gate, with the Countess’s boxes packed upon it; and presently that lady herself was seen getting into the vehicle. After a last shake of the hand to Mr Barton, and last kisses to Milly and the children, the door was closed; and as the fly rolled off, the little party at the Vicarage gate caught a last glimpse of the handsome Countess leaning and waving kisses from the carriage window. Jet’s little black phiz was also seen, and doubtless he had his thoughts and feelings on the occasion, but he kept them strictly within his own bosom.

The schoolmistress opposite witnessed this departure, and lost no time in telling it to the schoolmaster, who again communicated the news to the landlord of “The Jolly Colliers,” at the close of the morning school-hours. Nanny poured the joyful tidings into the ear of Mr Farquhar’s footman, who happened to call with a letter, and Mr Brand carried them to all the patients he visited that morning, after calling on Mrs Barton. So that before Sunday, it was very generally known in Shepperton parish, that the Countess Czerlaski had left the Vicarage.

The Countess had left, but alas! the bills she had contributed to swell still remained; so did the exiguity of the children’s clothing, which also was partly an indirect consequence of her presence; and so, too, did the coolness and alienation in the parishioners, which could not at once vanish before the fact of her departure. The Rev. Amos was not exculpated—the past was not expunged. But, what was worse than all, Milly’s health gave frequent cause for alarm, and the prospect of baby’s birth was overshadowed by more than the usual fears. The birth came prematurely, about six weeks after the Countess’s departure, but Mr Brand gave favourable reports to all inquirers on the following day, which was Saturday. On Sunday, after morning service, Mrs Hackit called at the Vicarage to inquire how Mrs Barton was, and was invited up-stairs to see her. Milly lay placid and lovely in her feebleness, and held out her hand to Mrs Hackit with a beaming smile. It was very pleasant to her to see her old friend unreserved and cordial once more. The seven months’ baby was very tiny and very red, but “handsome is that handsome does,”—he was pronounced to be “doing well,” and Mrs Hackit went home gladdened at heart to think that the perilous hour was over.

CHAPTER VIII.

The following Wednesday, when Mr and Mrs Hackit were seated comfortably by their bright hearth, enjoying the long afternoon afforded by an early dinner, Rachel, the housemaid, came in and said—

“If you please ‘m, the shepherd says, have you heard as Mrs Barton’s wuss, and not expected to live?”

Mrs Hackit turned pale, and hurried out to question the shepherd, who, she found, had heard the sad news at an alehouse in the village. Mr Hackit followed her out and said, “Thee’dst better have the pony-chaise, and go directly.”

“Yes,” said Mrs Hackit, too much overcome to utter any exclamations. “Rachel, come an’ help me on wi’ my things.”

When her husband was wrapping her cloak round her feet in the pony-chaise, she said—

“If I don’t come home to-night, I shall send back the pony-chaise, and you’ll know I’m wanted there.”

“Yes, yes.”

It was a bright frosty day, and by the time Mrs Hackit arrived at the Vicarage, the sun was near its setting. There was a carriage and pair standing at the gate, which she recognised as Dr Madeley’s, the physician from Rotherby. She entered at the kitchen door, that she might avoid knocking, and quietly question Nanny. No one was in the kitchen, but, passing on, she saw the sitting-room door open, and Nanny, with Walter in her arms, removing the knives and forks, which had been laid for dinner three hours ago.

“Master says he can’t eat no dinner,” was Nanny’s first word. “He’s never tasted nothin’ sin’ yesterday mornin’, but a cup o’ tea.”

“When was your missis took worse?”

“O’ Monday night. They sent for Dr Madeley i’ the middle o’ the day yesterday, an’ he’s here again now.”

“Is the baby alive?”

“No, it died last night. The children’s all at Mrs Bond’s. She came and took ’em away last night, but the master says they must be fetched soon. He’s up-stairs now, wi’ Dr Madeley and Mr Brand.”

At this moment Mrs Hackit heard the sound of a heavy, slow foot, in the passage; and presently Amos Barton entered, with dry despairing eyes, haggard and unshaven. He expected to find the sitting-room as he left it, with nothing to meet his eyes but Milly’s work-basket in the corner of the sofa, and the children’s toys overturned in the bow-window. But when he saw Mrs Hackit come towards him with answering sorrow in her face, the pent-up fountain of tears was opened; he threw himself on the sofa, hid his face, and sobbed aloud.

“Bear up, Mr Barton,” Mrs Hackit ventured to say at last, “bear up for the sake o’ them dear children.”

“The children,” said Amos, starting up. “They must be sent for. Some one must fetch them. Milly will want to......”

He couldn’t finish the sentence, but Mrs Hackit understood him and said, “I’ll send the man with the pony-carriage for ’em.”

She went out to give the order, and encountered Dr Madeley and Mr Brand, who were just going.

Mr Brand said: “I am very glad to see you are here, Mrs Hackit. No time must be lost in sending for the children. Mrs Barton wants to see them.”

“Do you quite give her up, then?”

“She can hardly live through the night. She begged us to tell her how long she had to live; and then asked for the children.”

The pony-carriage was sent; and Mrs Hackit, returning to Mr Barton, said she should like to go up-stairs now. He went up-stairs with her and opened the door. The chamber fronted the west; the sun was just setting, and the red light fell full upon the bed, where Milly lay with the hand of death visibly upon her. The feather-bed had been removed, and she lay low on a mattress with her head slightly raised by pillows. Her long fair neck seemed to be struggling with a painful effort; her features were pallid and pinched, and her eyes were closed. There was no one in the room but the nurse, and the mistress of the free school, who had come to give her help from the beginning of the change.

Amos and Mrs Hackit stood beside the bed, and Milly opened her eyes.

“My darling, Mrs Hackit is come to see you.”

Milly smiled and looked at her with that strange, far-off look which belongs to ebbing life.

“Are the children coming?” she said, painfully.

“Yes, they will be here directly.”

She closed her eyes again.

Presently the pony-carriage was heard; and Amos, motioning to Mrs Hackit to follow him, left the room. On their way down stairs, she suggested that the carriage should remain to take them away again afterwards, and Amos assented.

There they stood in the melancholy sitting-room—the five sweet children, from Patty to Chubby—all, with their mother’s eyes—all, except Patty, looking up with a vague fear at their father as he entered. Patty understood the great sorrow that was come upon them, and tried to check her sobs as she heard her papa’s footsteps.

“My children,” said Amos, taking Chubby in his arms, “God is going to take away your dear mamma from us. She wants to see you to say good-by. You must try to be very good and not cry.”

He could say no more, but turned round to see if Nanny was there with Walter, and then led the way up-stairs, leading Dickey with the other hand. Mrs Hackit followed with Sophy and Patty, and then came Nanny with Walter and Fred.

It seemed as if Milly had heard the little footsteps on the stairs, for when Amos entered her eyes were wide open, eagerly looking towards the door. They all stood by the bedside—Amos nearest to her, holding Chubby and Dickey. But she motioned for Patty to come first, and clasping the poor pale child by the hand, said,—

“Patty, I’m going away from you. Love your papa. Comfort him; and take care of your little brothers and sisters. God will help you.”

Patty stood perfectly quiet, and said, “Yes, mamma.”

The mother motioned with her pallid lips for the dear child to lean towards her and kiss her; and then Patty’s great anguish overcame her, and she burst into sobs. Amos drew her towards him and pressed her head gently to him, while Milly beckoned Fred and Sophy, and said to them, more faintly:—

“Patty will try to be your mamma when I am gone, my darlings. You will be good, and not vex her.”

They leaned towards her, and she stroked their fair heads, and kissed their tear-stained cheeks. They cried because mamma was ill and papa looked so unhappy; but they thought, perhaps next week things would be as they used to be again.

The little ones were lifted on the bed to kiss her. Little Walter said, “Mamma, mamma,” and stretched out his fat arms and smiled; and Chubby seemed gravely wondering; but Dickey, who had been looking fixedly at her, with lip hanging down, ever since he came into the room, now seemed suddenly pierced with the idea that mamma was going away somewhere; his little heart swelled, and he cried aloud.

Then Mrs Hackit and Nanny took them all away. Patty at first begged to stay at home and not go to Mrs Bond’s again; but when Nanny reminded her that she had better go to take care of the younger ones, she submitted at once, and they were all packed in the pony-carriage once more.

Milly kept her eyes shut for some time after the children were gone. Amos had sunk on his knees, and was holding her hand while he watched her face. By-and-by she opened her eyes, and, drawing him close to her, whispered slowly,

“My dear—dear—husband—you have been—very—good to me. You—have—made me—very—happy.”

She spoke no more for many hours. They watched her breathing becoming more and more difficult, until evening deepened into night, and until midnight was past. About half-past twelve she seemed to be trying to speak, and they leaned to catch her words.

“Music—music—didn’t you hear it?”

Amos knelt by the bed, and held her hand in his. He did not believe in his sorrow. It was a bad dream. He did not know when she was gone. But Mr Brand, whom Mrs Hackit had sent for before twelve o’clock, thinking that Mr Barton might probably need his help, now came up to him and said,—

“She feels no more pain now. Come, my dear sir, come with me.”

“She isn’t dead?” shrieked the poor desolate man, struggling to shake off Mr Brand, who had taken him by the arm. But his weary, weakened frame was not equal to resistance, and he was dragged out of the room.

CHAPTER IX.

They laid her in the grave—the sweet mother with her baby in her arms—while the Christmas snow lay thick upon the graves. It was Mr Cleves who buried her. On the first news of Mr Barton’s calamity, he had ridden over from Tripplegate to beg that he might be made of some use, and his silent grasp of Amos’s hand had penetrated like the painful thrill of life-recovering warmth to the poor benumbed heart of the stricken man.

The snow lay thick upon the graves, and the day was cold and dreary; but there was many a sad eye watching that black procession as it passed from the vicarage to the church, and from the church to the open grave. There were men and women standing in that churchyard who had bandied vulgar jests about their pastor, and who had lightly charged him with sin; but now, when they saw him following the coffin, pale and haggard, he was consecrated anew by his great sorrow, and they looked at him with respectful pity.

All the children were there, for Amos had willed it so, thinking that some dim memory of that sacred moment might remain even with little Walter, and link itself with what he would hear of his sweet mother in after years. He himself led Patty and Dickey; then came Sophy and Fred; Mr Brand had begged to carry Chubby, and Nanny followed with Walter. They made a circle round the grave while the coffin was being lowered. Patty alone of all the children felt that mamma was in that coffin, and that a new and sadder life had begun for papa and herself. She was pale and trembling, but she clasped his hand more firmly as the coffin went down, and gave no sob. Fred and Sophy, though they were only two and three years younger, and though they had seen mamma in her coffin, seemed to themselves to be looking at some strange show. They had not learned to decipher that terrible handwriting of human destiny, illness and death. Dickey had rebelled against his black clothes, until he was told that it would be naughty to mamma not to put them on, when he at once submitted; and now, though he had heard Nanny say that mamma was in heaven, he had a vague notion that she would come home again to-morrow, and say he had been a good boy, and let him empty her workbox. He stood close to his father, with great rosy cheeks and wide open blue eyes, looking first up at Mr Cleves and then down at the coffin, and thinking he and Chubby would play at that, when they got home.

The burial was over, and Amos turned with his children to re-enter the house—the house where, an hour ago, Milly’s dear body lay, where the windows were half-darkened, and sorrow seemed to have a hallowed precinct for itself, shut out from the world. But now she was gone; the broad snow-reflected daylight was in all the rooms; the Vicarage again seemed part of the common working-day world, and Amos, for the first time, felt that he was alone—that day after day, month after month, year after year, would have to be lived through without Milly’s love. Spring would come, and she would not be there; summer, and she would not be there; and he would never have her again with him by the fireside in the long evenings. The seasons all seemed irksome to his thoughts; and how dreary the sunshiny days that would be sure to come! She was gone from him; and he could never show her his love any more, never make up for omissions in the past by filling future days with tenderness.

O the anguish of that thought, that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God had given us to know!

Amos Barton had been an affectionate husband, and while Milly was with him, he was never visited by the thought that perhaps his sympathy with her was not quick and watchful enough; but now he re-lived all their life together, with that terrible keenness of memory and imagination which bereavement gives, and he felt as if his very love needed a pardon for its poverty and selfishness.

No outward solace could counteract the bitterness of this inward woe. But outward solace came. Cold faces looked kind again, and parishioners turned over in their minds what they could best do to help their pastor. Mr Oldinport wrote to express his sympathy, and enclosed another twenty-pound note, begging that he might be permitted to contribute in this way to the relief of Mr Barton’s mind from pecuniary anxieties, under the pressure of a grief which all his parishioners must share; and offering his interest towards placing the two eldest girls in a school expressly founded for clergymen’s daughters. Mr Cleves succeeded in collecting thirty pounds among his richer clerical brethren, and, adding ten pounds himself, sent the sum to Amos, with the kindest and most delicate words of Christian fellowship and manly friendship. Miss Jackson forgot old grievances, and came to stay some months with Milly’s children, bringing such material aid as she could spare from her small income. These were substantial helps, which relieved Amos from the pressure of his money difficulties; and the friendly attentions, the kind pressure of the hand, the cordial looks he met with everywhere in his parish, made him feel that the fatal frost which had settled on his pastoral duties, during the Countess’s residence at the Vicarage, was completely thawed, and that the hearts of his parishioners were once more open to him.

No one breathed the Countess’s name now; for Milly’s memory hallowed her husband, as of old the place was hallowed on which an angel from God had alighted.

When the spring came, Mrs Hackit begged that she might have Dickey to stay with her, and great was the enlargement of Dickey’s experience from that visit. Every morning he was allowed—being well wrapped up as to his chest, by Mrs Hackit’s own hands, but very bare and red as to his legs—to run loose in the cow and poultry yard, to persecute the turkey-cock by satirical imitations of his gobble-gobble, and to put difficult questions to the groom as to the reasons why horses had four legs, and other transcendental matters. Then Mr Hackit would take Dickey up on horseback when he rode round his farm, and Mrs Hackit had a large plumcake in, cut ready to meet incidental attacks of hunger. So that Dickey had considerably modified his views as to the desirability of Mrs Hackit’s kisses.

The Miss Farquhars made particular pets of Fred and Sophy, to whom they undertook to give lessons twice a-week in writing and geography; and Mrs Farquhar devised many treats for the little ones. Patty’s treat was to stay at home, or walk about with her papa; and when he sat by the fire in an evening, after the other children were gone to bed, she would bring a stool, and placing it against his feet, would sit down upon it and lean her head against his knee. Then his hand would rest on that fair head, and he would feel that Milly’s love was not quite gone out of his life.

So the time wore on till it was May again, and the church was quite finished and reopened in all its new splendour, and Mr Barton was devoting himself with more vigour than ever to his parochial duties. But one morning—it was a very bright morning, and evil tidings sometimes like to fly in the finest weather—there came a letter for Mr Barton, addressed in the Vicar’s handwriting. Amos opened it with some anxiety—somehow or other he had a presentiment of evil. The letter contained the announcement that Mr Carpe had resolved on coming to reside at Shepperton, and that, consequently, in six months from that time Mr Barton’s duties as curate in that parish would be closed.

O, it was hard! Just when Shepperton had become the place where he most wished to stay—where he had friends who knew his sorrows—where he lived close to Milly’s grave. To part from that grave seemed like parting with Milly a second time; for Amos was one who clung to all the material links between his mind and the past. His imagination was not vivid, and required the stimulus of some actual perception.

It roused some bitter feeling, too, to think that Mr Carpe’s wish to reside at Shepperton was merely a pretext for removing Mr Barton, in order that he might ultimately give the curacy of Shepperton to his own brother-in-law, who was known to be wanting a new position.

Still, it must be borne; and the painful business of seeking another curacy must be set about without loss of time. After the lapse of some months, Amos was obliged to renounce the hope of getting one at all near Shepperton, and he at length resigned himself to accepting one in a distant county. The parish was in a large manufacturing town, where his walks would lie among noisy streets and dingy alleys, and where the children would have no garden to play in, no pleasant farmhouses to visit.

It was another blow inflicted on the bruised man.

CHAPTER X.

At length the dreaded week was come, when Amos and his children must leave Shepperton. There was general regret among the parishioners at his departure: not that any one of them thought his spiritual gifts pre-eminent, or was conscious of great edification from his ministry. But his recent troubles had called out their better sympathies, and that is always a source of love. Amos failed to touch the spring of goodness by his sermons, but he touched it effectually by his sorrows; and there was now a real bond between him and his flock.

“My heart aches for them poor motherless children,” said Mrs Hackit to her husband, “a-goin’ among strangers, an’ into a nasty town, where there’s no good victuals to be had, and you must pay dear to get bad ‘uns.”

Mrs Hackit had a vague notion of a town-life as a combination of dirty backyards, measly pork, and dingy linen.

The same sort of sympathy was strong among the poorer class of parishioners. Old stiff-jointed Mr Tozer, who was still able to earn a little by gardening “jobs,” stopped Mrs Cramp, the charwoman, on her way home from the Vicarage, where she had been helping Nanny to pack up the day before the departure, and inquired very particularly into Mr Barton’s prospects.

“Ah, poor mon,” he was heard to say, “I am surry fur ’im. He hedn’t much here, but he’ll be wuss off theer. Half a loaf’s better nor ne’er ‘un.”

The sad good-byes had all been said before that last evening; and after all the packing was done and all the arrangements were made, Amos felt the oppression of that blank interval in which one has nothing left to think of but the dreary future—the separation from the loved and familiar, and the chilling entrance on the new and strange. In every parting there is an image of death.

Soon after ten o’clock, when he had sent Nanny to bed, that she might have a good night’s rest before the fatigues of the morrow, he stole softly out to pay a last visit to Milly’s grave. It was a moonless night, but the sky was thick with stars, and their light was enough to show that the grass had grown long on the grave, and that there was a tombstone telling in bright letters on a dark ground, that beneath were deposited the remains of Amelia, the beloved wife of Amos Barton, who died in the thirty-fifth year of her age, leaving a husband and six children to lament her loss. The final words of the inscription were, “Thy will be done.”

The husband was now advancing towards the dear mound from which he was so soon to be parted, perhaps for ever. He stood a few minutes reading over and over again the words on the tombstone, as if to assure himself that all the happy and unhappy past was a reality. For love is frightened at the intervals of insensibility and callousness that encroach by little and little on the dominion of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the keenness of the first anguish.

Gradually, as his eye dwelt on the words, “Amelia, the beloved wife,” the waves of feeling swelled within his soul, and he threw himself on the grave, clasping it with his arms and kissing the cold turf.

“Milly, Milly, dost thou hear me? I didn’t love thee enough—I wasn’t tender enough to thee—but I think of it all now.”

The sobs came and choked his utterance, and the warm tears fell.

CONCLUSION.

Only once again in his life has Amos Barton visited Milly’s grave. It was in the calm and softened light of an autumnal afternoon, and he was not alone. He held on his arm a young woman, with a sweet, grave face, which strongly recalled the expression of Mrs Barton’s, but was less lovely in form and colour. She was about thirty, but there were some premature lines round her mouth and eyes, which told of early anxiety.

Amos himself was much changed. His thin circlet of hair was nearly white, and his walk was no longer firm and upright. But his glance was calm, and even cheerful, and his neat linen told of a woman’s care. Milly didn’t take all her love from the earth when she died. She had left some of it in Patty’s heart.

All the other children were now grown up, and had gone their several ways. Dickey, you will be glad to hear, had shown remarkable talents as an engineer. His cheeks are still ruddy, in spite of mixed mathematics, and his eyes are still large and blue; but in other respects his person would present no marks of identification for his friend Mrs Hackit, if she were to see him; especially now that her eyes must be grown very dim, with the wear of more than twenty additional years. He is nearly six feet high, and has a proportionately broad chest; he wears spectacles, and rubs his large white hands through a mass of shaggy brown hair. But I am sure you have no doubt that Mr Richard Barton is a thoroughly good fellow, as well as a man of talent, and you will be glad any day to shake hands with him, for his own sake as well as his mother’s.

Patty alone remains by her father’s side, and makes the evening sunshine of his life.

TICKET-OF-LEAVE.

A LETTER TO IRENÆUS.

Christmas Eve, 1856.

My dear Irenæus,—A merry Yule-tide, and may the young year use you as well as the old ones, and so you will do very well! So you did not ask me to eat my Christmas dinner with you; yours is strictly a family party. The Rector, and the Rose and rose-buds of Devon, and a spinster cousin of yours, a kind of benignant Banshee of your house, who comes to light not when any one is going to die, but whenever all the members of your family are going to live—particularly well: kissed under the mistletoe like the rest, and blushing like the evening when the Reverend Celsus unbends so far as to acknowledge that relic of heathendom, the wicked parasitical plant with which the fair god Balder was slain. Well, Irenæus, an old bachelor at Christmas is not much unlike the mistletoe; he cannot live by himself; has no roots of his own, and must find some family oak to fix himself upon. He cannot dine drearily in his rooms, or sulk at his club on Christmas day: he must turn parasite for the nonce; and then it is his duty like the mistletoe to promote the fun as much as possible. Irenæus, if no eyes but thine were destined to look at this page, I might tell thee where I ate my Christmas dinner, but my letter is peculiarly circumstanced. There is a grave old lady called Maga looking over my shoulder while I write, and I am obliged to be circumspect in consequence. But if I could have eaten two Christmas dinners, as young ladies in town go to two or even more balls of a night, I certainly should like to have eaten my second with you; or had I the power to divide myself, my wraith or double should have sat down with you, uninvited as Banquo’s ghost, but rather more cheerfully; that is, if a wraith or double possesses digestive organs, and organs capable of digesting a Christmas dinner. Howbeit I can picture in imagination the cheerfulness of your fireside; the delighted scream of the children at the blazing pudding, puzzled to know how they were to eat fire, especially with a grandpapa whose name implies that he is not a fire-eater himself, although I suspect him of being so in spite of his name;—the blind man’s buff and hunt-the-slipper with Irenæus obliged to pay forfeit and remove a taper from a basin of water with his mouth; the Christmas tree, that prettiest of all modern importations from Germany, like many other pretty things a little dangerous, liable to set people a-fire—hung round with the gifts which the little ones believe came from the Babe of Bethlehem; and when the little ones are gone to bed, the quiet rubber in the corner, which Irenæus has on principle, because the Puritans think cards wicked at all times, and especially on Christmas day; not that he cares much about it himself, for he only plays for postage stamps. I know that Christmas is a good time with you, Irenæus, not coming, but come; like that Christmas of the heathen Romans—

When round the lonely cottage

Roars loud the tempest’s din,

And the good logs of Algidus

Roar louder yet within.

When the oldest cask is opened,

And the largest lamp is lit;

When the chestnuts glow in the embers,

And the kid turns on the spit;

When young and old in circle

Around the fire-brands close;

When the girls are wearing baskets,

And the lads are shaping bows.

Might not Macaulay have said that the girls were also shaping beaux in their imaginations? Forgive me—but on such a subject and at such a time, the saturnalia of our year—even a pun is pardonable, however despicable in itself. How strange is the power of suggestion! I meant not when I sat down to write, to wish you more than the compliments of the season, but I see now that I am in for a long letter, and so are you. I do not mean to cross it, and thus you will have no excuse for not reading it through. “The good logs of Algidus” have suggested to me your wood-fire, the very poetry of fires, and your wood-fire has suggested your wood-cutter, and your wood-cutter has suggested a ticket-of-leave man; and as I have been thinking somewhat lately on this subject of tickets-of-leave, I by these presents take you by the button, and compel you to listen to the matter of my ruminations, even as that eternal gossip detained Horace, when he was walking in the sacred road “according to his wont.” I still think your experiment with regard to that man a dangerous one. Had you been a preserver of game, you would have done better to have made him a gamekeeper, on the principle of “set a thief to catch a thief,” as he got into trouble by poaching with aggravations. The most sensible proposition I have seen yet, with regard to ticket-of-leave men, was that of some speaker at a country public dinner, who proposed that they should be made policemen. No other scheme has appeared to me to hold water in the slightest degree. You get a parcel of jail-birds together, till their cage or “jug,” as it is affectionately called by the fraternity, is inconveniently full. In order to relieve its superabundance, you select the mildest specimens, or those who appear so to the chaplain, clip a feather of their wings and let them fly again about society at large, forgetting that a clipt feather will soon grow again. You give them a ticket-of-leave—to be at large, and they naturally give a large interpretation to the term, so that a ticket-of-leave has become like an indulgence in the worst times of Popery, the principal difference being that those who granted indulgences were wise enough to get paid for them beforehand, while those who grant tickets-of-leave are fools enough to do it for nothing, and earn into the bargain the maledictions of all timid old gentlemen, and the anathemas of all elderly ladies, if elderly ladies be ever sufficiently unguarded to utter anathemas, as the Council of Trent did. The other day poor Mrs Seacole, of Crimean memory,

“Spake a bitter jest”

in the court of bankruptcy, and asked for her ticket-of-leave, adding that she did not mean to garotte any one in consequence; it being generally understood that a ticket-of-leave would be interpreted by the public to be a license to garotte with impunity, giving a sacred or sacrosanct character to the bearer, like that of a Briton with a Foreign Office passport, an ancient Roman tribune or a modern Swiss idiot, the latter two classes of people licensed to make themselves disagreeable to others to any extent within or without reasonable bounds. We have all heard of Le spectre rouge, and how it has frightened the French people from their impropriety, bending their necks to the stern yoke of absolutism. The same honourable position appears to be occupied now in England by the spectre denominated Ticket-of-leave. Oh, for the brush of a limner that I might portray him, as he is portrayed to the imagination of Materfamilias Tomkins, whose husband is a worthy clerk in the City, and has to walk every evening to a white-washed cottage at Bow, running the gauntlet of all the white-washed blackguards of Whitechapel on the road to it! I claim no originality in wishing for a limner’s brush to eke out the weakness of my words, the conceit is as old as Anacreon. I naturally turn as a model to that ode in which the poet apostrophises his mistress—

Ἄγε Ζωγράφων ἄριστε

Γράφε Ζωγράφων ἄριστε

Τεχνοκοίρανε ῥόδειε

Ἀπεοῦσαν ὡς ἂν εἴπω

Γράφε τὴν ἐμὴν ἑταίραν,
with questionable compliment, calling upon the best animal painter, the Landseer of Samos, to paint her according to description in her absence. But I find as I read on, that the glorifications of feminine loveliness can scarcely be paraphrased so as to do for Bill Sykes. Here is one that will serve my purpose better, addressed to some graceless youth of the poet’s acquaintance, I mean the Ode to Bathyllus. I suppose a confederate speaking to the painter or photographer, though a case not likely to happen, in fact, unless he wished to turn Queen’s evidence.

Ἐἰς Βάθυλλον.

Γράφε μοι Βάθυλλον οὕτω

Τὸν ἑταῖρον ὡς διδάσκω

Λιπαρὰς κόμας ποίησον

Τὰ μὲν ἔνδοθεν μελαίνας,

Τὰ δ’ ες ἄκρον ἡλιωσας

Ἕλικας δ’ ἐλαυθέρους μοι

Πλοκάμων, ἀτακτα συνθεὶς,

Ἄφες, ὡς θέλωσι, κεῖσθαι

Απαλὸν δὲ καὶ δροσῶδες

Στεφέτω μέτωπον, ὀφρὺς

Κυανωτέρη δρακόντων.

Μέλας ὄμμα γοργὸν ἔστω,

Κεκερασμένον γαλήνῃ*

Τὸ μὲν ἐξ Ἄρηος ἕλκον

Το δε τῆς καλῆς Κυθήρης

Ἵνα τις τὸ μὲν φοβῆται

Τὸ δ’ ἀπ’ ἐλπίδος κρεμᾶται.

Ῥοδίνην δ’, ὁποια μῆλον

Χνοΐην ποίει παρειήυ*

Ερυθημά δ’ ὡς ἄν Αἰδοῦς

(Λύνασαι) πάλιν ποίησον.

Τὸ δὲ χεῖλος, οὐκ ἔτ’ οἶδα

Τίνι μοι τροπῳ ποιήσεις * *

Ἁπαλὸν, γέμοντε πειθοῦς ——

Τὸ δὲ πᾶν, ὁ κηρὸς αὐτὸς

Ἐχέτω λαλῶν σιωπῇ.

Μετὰ δὲ πρόσωπον ἔστω

Τὸν Ἀδώνιδος παρελθὼν,

Ἐλεφάντινος τράχηλος.

Μεταμάζιον δε ποίει

Δίδυμάς τε χεῖρας Ἑρμοῦ;

Πολυδεύκεος δε μηροὺς

Λιονυσίην δὲ νηδύν.

Φθονερηὺ ἔχεις δὲ τέχνηυ,

Ὅτι μὴ τὰ νῶτα δεῖξαι,

Δύνασαι* τὰ δ’ ἦν ἀμείνω.

Τί πόδας με δεῖ δί δάσκειν;

Λάβε μισθὸν, ὅσσον εἴπῃς.

Τὸν Ἐκηβόλον δὲ τοῦτον

Καθελὼν, ποίει Βάθυλλον.

Ὅτε δ’ ἐς Σαμου ποτ’ ἐλθης

Γράφε Φοῖβον ἐκ Βαθύλλον.

ON BILL SYKES.

(After Anacreon.)

Paint me, Cruikshank, Doyle, or Leech,

Sykes, my pal, as now I teach.

Paint his hair, smut-black and sleek,

Methodistically meek,

Sheared as round a beechen bowl

On the temples; at the pole,

Topknot like a blacking-brush

Which no comb shall tear or crush;

So the porcupine his quill

Droops or upright sets at will.

Paint a clammy forehead now

Heavy, villanously low;

Eyebrows like a coat threadbare;

Eyelids innocent of hair,

Proof against the grease of bear.

Goggle eyes of sullen glare,

Overspread with oily calm

When he sings the prison-psalm;

Piglike in their want of passion;

Catlike in their hue and fashion;

Which to some suggest resistance,

And to some respectful distance.

With his cheek if art can grapple,

Paint it like a stale pine-apple,

Blotched, and mountainous and yellow,

Never blushing (trust the fellow)

Save when liquor spreads the rose

Sidewards from his blushing nose.

Deeply in your medium dip

When you paint the blubber lip,

Mute, yet eloquent of sin,

Blistered with sulphuric gin.

Paint a bloated figure-head,

As found drowned in Thames’ bed.

Let a flashy kerchief deck

Hippopotamus’s neck.

Paint a chest, the dread of Peelers,

Paint his vice-like, vicious feelers,

Paint his legs, short, bowed, and staunch;

Paint a bacchanalian paunch,

Pity that you cannot turn,

Paint at once both stem and stern;

With those pockets, which in doubt

Beaks and traps turn inside out,

Keeping snugly under hatches

Centrebits, and files and matches,

Crowbars, keys and all the things

Good for opening locks and springs.

Paint me last those high-low’d feet

Wary of policeman’s beat.

When you’ve finished my commission,

Take it to the Exhibition.

Surely their Hanging Committee

Must on William Sykes take pity,

Else you might break in by night

And unfix some city knight,

Some lock-jawed pre-Raphaelite,

Some interior, landscape, plan,

“Portrait of a gentleman.”

So may soar in pride of place

Our Bill Sykes’s gallows face,

Not transported, but in fine

Hung precisely on the line.

But, in sober earnest, I think the portrait of Ticket-of-leave, if it appeared on the walls of the Royal Academy, might produce unpleasant consequences to ladies in an interesting condition, as happened when Æschylus brusquely exhibited his Eumenides at Athens, so great a horror has been engendered in the public mind by the creature’s late misdoings. The word “ticket” was not in very good odour before, between pawnbrokers’ tickets and lottery tickets. But it was only disreputable; now it has become formidable. People will ask tremblingly for tickets of leave for admission to lectures, concerts, and the opera. They will fancy that every person travelling by railroad in possession of his ticket, bears also a ticket-of-leave; and should the omnibus companies adopt them, as in Paris, they will certainly prove fatal to their traffic. Joking apart, I am not sorry, for some reasons, for this panic and its causes. It serves to explode, with other things that have occurred of late, the bubbles of progress and human perfectibility. The other day we were almost argued into a belief in universal peace, and we have been disenchanted by a war as barbaric as any that has been waged before in pomp and circumstance. Now people are beginning to grow sick of the humanity-hobby, and to allow that after all there are some worse remedies for moral disease than honest hanging. Calcraft is likely to have his declining years consoled by an increasing reverence for his profession, and even to be looked upon in the end as a most indispensable member of society. The “London Scoundrel,” if his language was as unobjectionable as his real meaning, has a chance of finding an echo in the popular heart, for the sovereign people has as much objection as any other monarch to have its prerogatives invaded by having its gullet compressed, or its ten-pound house burglariously entered. Domitian fell when he began to be an object of terror to the cobblers, and so, it is to be hoped, will that modern Domitian, the ticket-of-leave man. He has at length succeeded in moving the masses, and the masses will come down on his head and crush him. Things were, indeed, come to a pretty pass. It required almost court interest to get hanged, and to get transported for life nearly as much as would suffice to get a subordinate clerkship in the Treasury. The judges seemed to have got universally bitten with the mania for lecturing, and a lecture from the bench was the panacea for all weaknesses which endangered or destroyed the lives and properties of peaceable subjects. Sent to jail, the prisoner was petted, and every encouragement given him to renew his visit. In the severest light, he was only looked upon as a patient, put upon the moral sick-list, and dieted with the same care and tenderness that patients are in the best regulated hospitals, so that there was often rather more trouble in getting him out than there was in getting him in. Not that matters are very much mended as yet. Notwithstanding the feeding and the petting, there are a class of detenus who, like spirited footmen, do not much like indoor work, or too much of it at one time. A craving for physical and intellectual exercise impels them to seek for means of release. Their trump cards in playing this trick are the chaplain and the doctor, or both, one after the other. The king and queen are played, and then to follow suit out comes the knave. Bill Sykes is contrite, avows that his late course of life is a warning to him, carefully stifles oaths unutterable, before uttered in conversation with the chaplain, the king of hearts. Chaplain pleads for his release, and half believes that he will go to the Antipodes, if he goes at all, only as a missionary. Doctor, an old woman, of course, and so of the feminine gender, the queen of hearts, feels his pulse, looks at his tongue, thinks prison-fare, confinement, and early hours are destroying his constitution and affecting his spirits. Doctor advises change of air and scene for the invalid, and so the patient leaves the hospital. A month afterwards back he comes again, being taken ill of a burglary, committed in delicate health at twelve o’clock on a night in January, and maliciously reported by the people in his own neighbourhood to be a dangerous character, albeit in official estimation a saintly valetudinarian.[3]

In the days of our fathers the ends of justice were defeated by making the punishments for crime not so much too heavy as too indiscriminating. Now they are defeated not so much by being too light as also by being too indiscriminating. Yet given the proper amount of discrimination, and they would still carry a little extra weight with advantage. The great mistake is in regarding the offence and not the offender. The adage that one man may steal an ox, while another is hanged for looking over the hedge, is an illustration of our criminal code as applied in past and present times.

During the Great Exhibition, a gentleman of good family got into a passion with a policeman who attempted to stop his horses, most probably adding some of the insolence of office, and cut him over the face with his whip. His offence was grave, but without malice prepense. The magistrate sent him to prison, and treated him like a common felon; and the newspapers eulogised the bright example of equal justice to rich and poor, and adjudged the administrator of the law a place in history beside Judge Gascoyne, who committed the king’s son. But in their intercourse with the professional ruffian, the skins of “unboiled lobsters” are not rated at so high a figure. Then they do not appear in the light of inviolable tribunes of the people. Some time ago I recollect reading of a wretch called Cannon, who infested Southwark, and was the bugbear of the street in which he lived by a habit he had of butting the passers-by with his head like a bull, establishing, by the terror of his name, a Cannon Street of his own on the Surrey side of the water. This Minotaur, often convicted, nearly killed a policeman in the execution of his duty, and evidently intended to do it outright. He was neither hanged nor transported, and so trivial was his sentence that it is the only circumstance of the case which has faded from my memory.

There was a yet more flagrant case the other day. It is so choice a morceau to illustrate my position, that I have copied it circumstantially, if not verbatim, from the Times.

MIDDLESEX SESSIONS. Before the Assistant-Judge at the Guildhall, Westminster.

Mary Horrigan, 17, and John Regan, 24 (lady first, gentleman afterwards), were indicted for unlawfully (!) assaulting and beating William Thorne, a constable of the Metropolitan force, whilst in the execution of his duty; and the prisoner Regan was further indicted for unlawfully assaulting and wounding George Anderson. The circumstances were these. Regan went to light his dudheen (he is an Emerald-Islander from his name) at the shop of Mr Bills, fishmonger, 27 Great Wild Street, Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields; Anderson (probably a Northerner), the fishmonger’s assistant, being engaged very properly in sweeping the shop. He went outside with the sawdust, and the Hibernian hit him on the mouth. Next day Regan, still unsatisfied, came again and brought a shillelah; Anderson dodged the shillelah; and then Regan hit him on the mouth again with his fist. Thorne, the policeman, who was on duty near, was called in; Regan came in without being called, and Anderson, being at home, naturally followed, Regan observing to him in strong language, “I’ll have your life before 12 o’clock to-night; you had better get the police to watch, for your life is in my hands.” Upon this Thorne, who knew the antecedents of the Regan, went to the station-house for more power, and returned to Wild Street with P. C. Williams, 133 F. They saw the Regan in Lincoln Street flourishing his sapling in one hand and a big knife in the other, apparently prepared for all emergencies. He was heard to exclaim that he would have the something’s life, and that he should like to see the policeman who would dare to take him. Thorne said that he would venture to attempt it, and caught hold of his shillelah-arm, when Regan made a pass at him with the knife, saying, “There, take a bit of cold steel.” The knife passed through his great-coat, but fortunately coming in contact with one of the metal buttons of the under coat, was bent. The Regan gave a fiendish howl, calling to some one to go and fetch Mike. Enter the Horrigan, a nymph doubtless inferior in reputation to the general run of her sisters of the sister isle, armed with a brindled bull-terrier, who answered to the abbreviation of the archangel’s name. She did not merely set him but threw him at P. C. Williams, who was helping Thorne to pacify the Regan. The dog seized Williams by the leg and forced him to let go the other brute, and Thorne was knocked down and kicked; the frail prisoner encouraging his male assailants to “give it him.” In the affray the prisoners were rescued by a large crowd of companions. The dog bit Thorne’s leg several times before he could get away. How these wild beasts were caught at last does not appear. The Saxon jury found Horrigan guilty of a common assault, and the Regan of all the counts.

What was the sentence? Did the Assistant-Judge put on the black cap and condemn Regan to hang by the neck till he was dead, and Horrigan to be whipped and put to bed? Not a bit of it. He did not do much, but he said a great deal. He was bitten, like Sir Robert Peel, with the lecturing mania.

“The assistant Judge said that the prisoner Regan was a most dangerous character (a new light having dawned upon him); for within the last six years he had been convicted no less than nine times for assaults on the police, and he had been dealt with by magistrates (very mild ones) in summary convictions; he had aimed a blow at the policeman with a knife (fact), which had providentially (very proper) been stopped by a button (bathos), or there could be but little doubt that it would have penetrated the flesh (knives will do so), and caused the man to drop down dead (another possibility approaching to probability), in which case he would have been tried (certainly) and hanged for murder (by no means so certainly.) Such offences must be visited with a long imprisonment (a little stronger), and he therefore sentenced him to imprisonment and hard labour for eighteen calendar (not lunar) months. As the Jury (gentle jury) had only found Horrigan guilty of a common assault (a little sarcastic), he should sentence her to imprisonment (poor caged dove!) for four months (three times four make twelve, and twelve months a year, and seventeen years Miss Horrigan’s life; so that, should she expire at the expiration of her term, a one-and-fortieth portion of her valuable life will have to pass in duresse. Poor Miss Horrigan!)”

I suppose I need not tell you, Irenæus, that the parentheses are my own. The magistrate made a proper distinction between sauce for the goose and sauce for the gander; but he did not spice it highly enough for either. He should have kept a rod in pickle for the woman, and the man he should certainly have promoted to the post of honour par excellence. Among certain savages people change names as the Germans drink brotherhood, by way of compliment. I do not know the name of the assistant Judge; but I think yours, Irenæus, would suit him to a nicety, and you had better take his. On the part of those who execute and administer the law, this tenderness towards malefactors is more intelligible than it is in the case of other members of society. Were the abolition of the police force voted by public acclamation to-morrow, each man agreeing to watch for himself over his own person and property, and at liberty to do justice to any extent on all aggressors, there is no doubt about it that all crime would quickly cease, as the criminals are, after all, a ridiculous minority of the people, as may be judged by the statistics of the memorable 10th of April 1848, when the peace-keepers mustered as ten to one to the peace-disturbers; and this is one great argument in favour of an unpaid magistracy and an unpaid constabulary. In Guernsey, where, to the best of my knowledge—and I speak from information gained many years ago—the police functions are undertaken by amateurs, no such outrages on person or property are ever heard of. It was even a dangerous matter then to attempt a comparatively innocent lark in a place where any one convicted of breaking a lamp had to pay for all the lamps broken since the last conviction, and where some of our party nearly frightened to death, or to taking a fishing-boat to France in stormy weather, a fellow-undergraduate—who had broken a lamp by accident, while engaged in the edifying amusement of displacing the lamp-covers—by forging a summons from the Royal Court of Guernsey, with “God save the Queen” in large letters at the bottom. We were nearly overdoing the joke, for our friend was on the way to the Royal Court to make a clean breast of it; and when we told him we had concocted the summons ourselves, he was for some time too frightened to believe it, and might have implicated the whole party. It must be borne in mind that the abolition of a criminal population would lead to an economical outcry for the abolition of all paid magistrates and paid policemen, and we cannot expect that a class of men will take pains to destroy their own body, although such conduct is not unheard of in individuals. It is only on such a principle that we can account for the existence in the heart of our civilisation of that imperium in imperio—the kleptocracy of England—the definite number of thousands of convicted thieves at large, somewhat outnumbering, I believe, the legislative body of Athenian citizens, all “known to the police,” and yet living in perfect security under the wing and eyes of the law, until they commit some fresh escapade. Surely it is nonsense to talk of habeas corpus in reference to these gentry. We expect too much of human nature. We expect men-catchers as a body to be more disinterested than rat-catchers. And rat-catchers, it is well known, have a habit of transferring the rodential population of one barn to another, that they may get another job. This is quite enough to account for the ticket-of-leave system.

We have probably the finest detective police in the world; the trouble they take in tracing crime, and bringing it home to the offender, is scarcely credible to any one who does not know the facts, or has not read Dickens’s masterly sketches of their proceedings. The detective, like a stanch huntsman, runs his fox to earth, digs him out, bags him, but then bolts him for another run. Thus the same fox, like the carted deer, will serve for many days’ sport, and perhaps grow old in the service, and get to enjoy the chase as much as those who pursue him. The public, however, have begun to grow rather weary of this fun, crying “what is sport to you is death to us,” and adopting the ultima ratio of writing letters to the Times and other newspapers, proposing ingenious plans for self-defence, and even retaliation,—some of them likely to be considered by the mealy-mouthed as a little bordering on the diabolical. For instance, one correspondent of the Morning Post proposes that persons going about London or its suburbs by night, should wear an antigarotte collar, on the principle of the collars worn by sheep-dogs in the Pyrenees to protect them from wolves; the said collar to be set round with barbed fish-hooks, which will fix themselves under the epidermis of the human boa constrictor’s hands when he attempts to throttle, and the said fish-hooks to be previously prepared by taking them to the nearest dissecting-room, and steeping them in some decomposed subject, so that the garotter will be certain to die under the poison, as occasionally happens to medical students who unwarily prick their fingers in dissection. A correspondent of the Times, more mild in disposition, advises holding the chin tight to the chest and shouting for the police (who of course are in the area-kitchen below, but too well occupied to hear). Another, more practical, recommends that a wrestling dodge should be tried on the garotter, the patient throwing back his right leg, and entwining it with that of the operator, who will thus be thrown on his back, with the patient above him, to work his will on him. Another suggests to the consideration of athletic persons like you, Irenæus, the possibility of catching the arm of the operator, and holding it tight, bending the back and throwing him over the head of the intended victim, breaking his back against the flags, if possible, in the fall. Another suggests wearing hob-nailed boots, and shin-kicking; another, of Levantine propensities, a dirk in the sleeve. I wonder that none of them has suggested, on the principle of setting a thief to catch a thief, the dog-fancier. I would buy the ugliest procurable bull-dog, crossed in one generation with a terrier, faithful and stanch, and sure to make his teeth meet in the calf of any aggressor. It is pleasanter to get rough work done for one than to do it oneself. That Mike who figured in our police report, would be exactly the fellow for us; the only fear is, that he would recognise his older master in the garotter, and as the Saxons treated Napoleon at Leipsic, go over to the enemy in the crisis of action.

With respect to burglars, it is really time, now that one policeman has been convicted of burglary, for the public to take the law into their own hands. It has been done in one or two instances, where we would least expect it, by the softer sex. One young lady having found the head of a man poking through the shutter, diminished it, as the classics would say, with a crowbar; another, rather too precipitous, and without asking “wha it is at my bower door?” shot her unexpected sweetheart, not named Finlay, in mistake for the expected cracksman. Chains, bolts, and locks are of little use, except to make a noise. Bells are troublesome for the servants to put up, and give false alarms in windy nights. I propose three things. A little dog, a big dog, and a revolver. The little dog to wake the big one, who sleeps soundly, especially after dinner, and the big dog to wake the many-mouthed barker, and assist in a scuffle, if a scuffle ensues. As a further precaution, I would suggest some rather unintelligible notice, such as “burglars decimated on these premises,” large enough to be read by moonlight; if in Runic characters, so much the better, for crime is naturally superstitious. Timid persons might act in this way, but bolder ones might sit up in ambush, place some plate on the hall table, and leave a window temptingly open, trusting to their accuracy of fire to give a good account of the intruder, when once in their power. As I observed before, the interest the constabulary and magistracy take in the preservation, propagation, and general encouragement of blackguards is perfectly intelligible; it would be even more so if, like the preservers of game, they had a battue for their amusement once in a way; but much less intelligible to me is the interest that the humanitarians and model-prison people take in the same direction. Those persons who are for reforming the human race, should reflect that we all want reform more or less, and efforts of that kind are much more likely to be successful with the simply vicious, like nineteen in every twenty of us, than with the wholly criminal. But benevolence must be eccentric to gain a hearing in Exeter Hall. As Thomas Carlyle justly observes in his Latter Day pamphlets, these jail-sweepings are the worst possible investment for benevolence. These people might as well invest their money in coaches to oppose the rail, but that in simply worldly matters they are far more sagacious. But it is intolerable that they should exercise their Promethean philanthropic turn to the detriment of society at large, furnishing a premium on crime, and putting it into the heads of quiet Dorsetshire labourers that it pays better to break the law and get into Pentonville prison, than to attempt to support a wife and family by honest labour on twelve shillings a-week. A “Dorsetshire labourer,” writing to the Times, has discovered that the detenus (I use the polite French word) in that Model prison get each for the sum of his rations for fifteen months 213 pounds of beef, 248 pounds of mutton, 81 pounds of beef-shins for soup, and for luncheons and severe teas no less than 655 mutton chops, 432 pints of porter, extra allowance. How these figures would have made the mouths of our poor heroes in the Crimea water, whom we were starving while we petted our criminals! What a frightful expenditure of honest stolid oxen, and innocent sheep and lambs, and sound wholesome malt, on dishonest men, ox-like only in their stolidity, sheepish only in their hypocrisy, and committing positive sacrilege while they unappreciatingly imbibed the heavy-wet which furnishes thews and sinews to the ploughman or the artisan! What a holocaust of God’s creatures offered on the altar of his enemy! The bread of affliction and the water of affliction is the proper diet for these worthies, not bœuf à-la-mode, or cotelettes à la jardinière, or Barclay and Perkins’ extra stout. Why did they not do the thing well at once, and order them rations of Burgundy, venison, and turtle? They might by these means make them too aldermanic to commit any of the more active crimes again, especially if the treadmill be abolished, and thereby benefit society; whereas by only going half-way they merely keep them in good condition, good working order for committing fresh offences. And any parsimony is unaccountable, considering that the money lavished on the appetites of these hungry villains does not come out of the pockets of the visiting magistrates, except so far as they are units in the aggregate of the tax-payers of Great Britain. On the whole, I think it would have been decidedly more economical to have ordered them ortolans, truffles, and hock, and champagne to wash them down with. They will perhaps balance the account better in future. I have been lately much struck with the extreme tenderness of our age and nation, and reluctance to take human life when it has become worthless both to the individual and to society, as contrasted with men’s extreme heedlessness of exposing valuable human life, or letting it go to be destroyed by a hundred preventible accidents. While it requires almost Court interest to get hanged, the commonest regulations to insure the safety of railway passengers are disregarded; and during the continuance of the late gales it was perfectly awful to read the list of shipwrecks, where all on board perished, including two crews of heroes who went in life-boats to rescue seamen in distress, most of which might be prevented by the construction of harbours of refuge along the coast at proper intervals by the very hands of the very scoundrels in question, forced into doing some good to their kind against their will. Even Palmer seemed to have some chance of getting off, when a short time before we had sacrificed the flower of our army by the most abominable official mismanagement. And although such an argument would not have much weight with the peace-party, who would endure all things without flinching, both from Russians and rascals, it seems to me a much stronger measure to sacrifice some thousands of good men and true, both of ourselves and of the enemy, in an international war, than to obliterate judicially a few hundreds of scoundrels who are doing all the harm they can to society. But I am not advocating at present severe measures. I only ask, why it is necessary to pet criminals? why, instead of putting them out of harm’s way, they are put in harm’s way as much as possible by Pentonville indulgences, tickets of leave, and the like, perpetuating the corruptions of a society quite bad enough if left to its mere vices, and multiplying it as they perpetuate it, each criminal forming a nucleus round which others may gather, like cases of sporadic cholera, until they have gained such a head that they are too much for us all, and will be calling out, when Lord John Russell’s new Reform scheme comes on, for members analogous to those of the Universities to represent their corporate body, perhaps even for life-peerages for their higher graduates? Imagine Bill Sykes, Member for the “Minority”[4] of Lambeth, and my Lords Erebus and Terror sitting cheek-by-jowl with the Archbishop of Canterbury! Or, perhaps, these gentlemen will end by swelling tickets-of-leave to the dimensions of the Red Spectre of Paris, and after a few days of barricades and blood, we shall find installed in the new palace of Westminster, a select provisional government of garotters, burglars, and murderers! There would be no question then of the social position of our humanitarian apostles, for even the moderados of villany will be superseded by the exaltados and swindlers; fraudulent bankers and adulterators of food will find themselves, for the first time, in the company of honest men, swept away in the general deluge. These people are either to be punished or not to be punished. If they have done nothing worthy of death or bonds, but only contracted a kind of moral measles which will give way to kind treatment and easy remedies, why put them in the close air of a prison at all? The virtue of a close sick-room is entirely exploded in the medical world, and only lingers in the opinions of superannuated monthly nurses. Why not put money in their purses, and pay their passages to some country where their antecedents are not known, and they will have a chance of living by honest means, which they have not here, even if they were to wish it? Why condemn them, if they do not wish to punish them, to the moral disease in perpetuity, inoculating others at the same time? Is it that they wish to keep them as interesting specimens, too valuable to the moral physiologist to be let go? If so, it is really time to interfere with the tastes of these pseudo-philanthropists, and to tell them that society has the same objection to their museums of abomination under its nose, as it has to tanyards and slaughter-houses near the public thoroughfares, or the putrifaction of the body of the great river-god who dwells in the Thames. As Gulliver recoiled from the embrace of the philosophers of Laputa, so will society recoil from the contact of those humanitarians who are engaged in a task of reconstruction or regeneration, equally hopeless, and equally offensive to the public senses. But and if these persons deserve punishment condign—if there is such a thing, and I am old-fashioned enough to believe it, as justice, human and divine—if impunity in crime inevitably reacts to the deterioration of human society, and pagan Nemesis has a living existence even for those who have discarded the divine authority of the Old Testament, I do think that nearly all the punishments enacted by law for offences, at least as administered by our magistrates, are most silly and inadequate; powerless, both for prevention and cure, and only calculated to reproduce the evil they profess to abate. A system which would be comparatively harmless in a country of sparse population like Norway or Canada, becomes multifariously pernicious in a bee-hive of human beings like that in which it is our destiny to breathe or try to breathe. It was a great principle with that famous schoolmaster Dr Arnold, who was withal a most humane and charitable man, in his conduct of a public school, to get rid as soon as possible of all pupils who, from his knowledge of human nature, he saw to be doing more harm than good to their companions and themselves by remaining, even before they were convicted of any overt infraction of law. Not that such cases are necessarily irreclaimable, but that in such a crowded place, the worst chance of reformation is given them, and the evil they do to others is indefinitely multiplied. With private tutors, or under the eye of parents, they might do better. He judged very much from physiognomy and physiology, nor was he often wrong. The consequence of his judicious system of weeding was, that he sent out into the world, as the rule, a class of high-minded and virtuous students, though, in the innocence of their hearts, generally Whigs and something more, being led to believe that the world in general was as much to be trusted as themselves, and their friends, and their beloved master. What is the population of London at the present day? How much above two millions, which is about the whole population of Norway? The drainage of the vast metropolis is a difficult problem in these days, but how much more difficult the problem of keeping the great Babylon sweet with such a cesspool of moral miasma festering in its vitals? Even a simple alien act, giving the executive the power of dismissing them from the focus of centralisation, would be better than the present system, as they would be easier to deal with when scattered abroad, and not living in a compact phalanx of opposition to all good government, shoulder to shoulder, as at present. It is perfectly frightful to think that the worst criminals are now often rescued from the officers of justice by a mob of bystanders, which implies that every individual in it is either a contemptible coward, or sympathises to the full extent with the crime they are committing. I should think, in charity to human nature, the former supposition the more probable, the metropolitan population having been panic-stricken by the long-continued impunity of those who set the law at defiance. Some time ago one Italian stabbed another in Rupert Street, and no one dared, although many persons witnessed the attempt at murder, to assist the police in arresting the offender. This is nearly as bad as the state of things said to exist at Rome, where the witnesses of an assassination run away as fast as they can, because it is the rule to arrest the nearest person on suspicion. British freedom is no doubt a fine thing, but like other fine things it has its drawbacks. It is one thing to leave the press unfettered and suppress the press-gang, and another to leave a university of convicted malefactors chartered and privileged to educate the young, and grant degrees to the old, in the heart of our metropolis: a Stinkomalee of rascaldom acting quite as much under the sanction of Government as Lord Brougham’s creation in Gower Street. This unquestionably diabolical university has more colleges than Oxford and Cambridge put together. It has its St Giles’ college, which answers to Christ Church or Trinity; its Bethnal Green college; its Tooley Street college; its City of London college; its slow colleges and fast colleges; its aristocratic Belgravian college, and its ecclesiastical Westminster college, a truly close foundation; its suburban colleges, situated half-pleasantly in the country, like St John’s, and Worcester, and Wadham at Oxford. It has its professors, who are better paid than ours at Oxford—professors of burglary, professors of highway robbery, professors of the gentler art of picking pockets, professors of stealing and receiving stolen goods, many of them on a more liberal principle than that adopted by our old universities—dissenters from the Church of England, and even of the Hebrew persuasion—and it has its realisation of the dreams of Mrs Colonel Bloomer in a strong staff of rights-of-women female professors, abominable she-devils who, having passed through and outlived every phase of infamy themselves, make it the last business of their lives to indoctrinate innocent freshwomen from the English counties, and if they cannot succeed in tempting them to moral suicide at home, do not scruple to use force and pack them off to Hamburg or Paris to be drugged and terrified into children of hell. Surely, if such an university must exist, it is strange that it is not thought advisable to put it under Government superintendence, and appoint regius professorships of Desmoterian History and Pastoral Demonology; Readerships in the “Mysteries of London,” the “Newgate Calendar,” and the “Memoirs of Harriet Wilson;” fellowships of felons, vacated like an Oxford fellowship by matrimony, but by no means by any of its imitations; chairs of Theoretical Toxicology and Clinical practice, combined with the whole art of child-murder. We cannot help wondering at the disinterestedness of a ministry, and that a Whig ministry, which overlooks such an abundantly fertile field of patronage, and so splendid an opportunity of providing outlying relatives and dependents at the expense of the nation. And what a fatal mistake it was to hang Palmer! He was just the man for the Chancellor of this liberal university of Alsatia, for that must be its most unchristian name. But to speak more seriously, if British freedom is not competent to put down such a state of things, and is for ever condemned to halt on one side, going about like the goddess Pœna of Horace, with a club-foot, would it be so very strong a measure to perform Tiefenbach’s operation on British freedom, and cut the shrunken sinew, or to put it on horseback and give it free action for a limited period? The Romans used to appoint a dictator in times of emergency whenever there was a Gallicus tumultus (which we might translate a French émeute), or even for the purpose of driving a nail into some door, and yet Roman freedom emerged from the temporary eclipse as bright as ever, perhaps even clearer and brighter. Might we not appoint a dictator for the purpose of knocking the nail on the head once for all, a strong responsible Hercules, who would turn the New River into the Augean stable of our social nuisances, and sweep them away once and for ever? Such men are to be found; at all events we might find a brook which would do the work of Hercules’s river, even Rajah Brooke of Borneo, the man who destroyed by one blast, like that of the destroying angel, some thousands of pestilent pirates. Such a man would, I take it, make short work with the “characters known to the police.” He might proceed either by secret fraud or open force. I should think he would prefer the latter. He might either, as Lord Shaftesbury did, call a public meeting of thieves, say in St Martin’s Hall, surround them with soldiers, and destroy them, as the Corcyræan democratical party in Thucydides did their political opponents; or he might lay all the heavy lighters in the Thames, which are so much in the way of its navigation, under an embargo, and have such a noyade at the river’s mouth as would turn the Goodwin Sands into corn and pasture land, superseding from thenceforth all necessity for lighthouses—an immense saving to the nation, and rendering the destruction of the villains of one generation a blessing to posterity, and a source of permanent security to mariners of all nations! And he would surely make short work of the tumbling down of all those streets, alleys, and courts of the metropolis known to be inhabited only by two-legged, four-legged, and six-legged vermin, scorching their sites with fire, and sowing the contaminated ground with salt; and he would burn with fire the gin-palaces, or Persian Jin-temples—(what a glorious illumination they would make, far better than that we had for the Peace!)—and feed the flames of their burning with all the poisoned products concocted by our adulterators of food, till all are consumed, the usual consumers standing by and applauding their great deliverance; and he would break down all the altars of Mormonism, Socialism, and hideous Infidelity, and burn Holywell Street with fire, and scatter to the winds the ashes of all ungodly and immoral publications, both letter-press and pictorial; and purify with the waters of lustration, so as to make them available for honest purposes, the Circumlocution offices, the Stock Exchange, the sanctimonious Banks, &c. &c.; in short, he would do all desirable good, and do away with all undesirable evil. And then, after his London season was over, during the continuance of which we would put the town in a state of siege, we would send him to star it in the provinces, and, to the tune of solemn music, perform the same office of lustration by all the other great towns of the British empire. I fear that were such a proposition mooted in the Imperial Parliament, it would be pooh-pooh’d by the Ministry, and received with derisive cheers by the Opposition, and voted unconstitutional by all, the consideration of it being perpetually adjourned to this day six months; and yet it is difficult to see how it can be any use to entertain the question of what we shall do with our criminals, without some such preliminary expurgation and purification.

Just as all measures for the diminution of the burden of our taxation are frustrated by the incubus of the national debt, so must all measures for the disposition of our rascals be rendered abortive by the enormous stock of them in hand becoming more morally putrescent and offensive the longer they endure, and effectually stopping the way of all sanitary and salutary improvement. It would seem, indeed, somewhat desirable that all questions of the day, now that the Russians have given us a little breathing-time, should be postponed to this, that our lay Legislature should turn away their attention from Committees of Supply, and our bench of Bishops from deciding on Liddell and Westerton, Ditcher and Denison cases, questions about more or less candles on the altar, boughs or flowers in the church, presence or absence of a cross, until this awful Frankenstein-ghost of our social condition is effectually exorcised and sent back to the place whence it came. But grant, for supposition’s sake, that it be done, that we have thus had one thorough sweeping and cleaning, painting and whitewashing, so as to be able to keep our house in order for the future by ordinary sweeping down of cobwebs, and the time come for us to consider what we are to do with our criminals, I should very much like to hear what your cool head and practical wisdom, Irenæus, has to say on this subject; and awaiting your reply, I venture, in the mean time, to lay before you my ruminations on this all-important matter. We must first take a glance at the nature of crime. Now crime is happily not the rule but the exception with men; it is otherwise with vice. Most men are more or less vicious, from those who suffer from delirium tremens down to those who take snuff; but few men, and fewer women, are criminal. Those that are so make such a fuss in the world, and succeed so well in establishing their importance, that they seem much more numerous than they are. The criminal classes, then, may be divided into the corrigible and the incorrigible, as, indeed, may the vicious classes, to which you and I belong, being one of us affected with the cacoethes scribendi, and the other with the evil habit of taking tobacco; and corrigible crime partakes of the nature of vice, just as incorrigible vice partakes of the nature of crime, and is apt to be resolved into it, as all the diseases of Athens were resolved into the plague. This division is, of course, as old as the hills and Aristotle, and I do not lay the slightest claim to originality in making it. Now it seems to me that our laws, in dealing with offences rather than offenders, take no cognisance of this division of human character, as to corrigible and incorrigible, except accidentally, and perhaps only by rule, in one case, that of homicide, where malice prepense is supposed to give it the character of wilful murder. But it strikes me that a murderer is by no means of necessity an incorrigible character, though the punishment of death may be just as the lowest in proportion to his offence. A man has sustained some grievous wrong from another, say that a scamp has run away with his wife; he cherishes his vengeance, he bides his time, he watches for him, and without going through the etiquette of a formal challenge, shoots him as you and I would be sorry to shoot a dog. Well, that man is a murderer, and I do not deny that, for the safety of society, he ought to be hung, and yet I know that he has lived honourably hitherto, if not very religiously and faithfully, in all the relations of life. He is certainly by no means one of the incorrigible class, nor is, as far as we can see, the forgiveness of Heaven out of the reach of his repentance. But here is a miscreant who has committed no act of violence, and whom, but for his aquiline features, you might take for a seedy dissenting minister, whose life has been passed till he is grey in discounting bills for foolish youths, and making them and their families miserable for life. He does not perhaps even cheat in his vile trade, but he pinches and pares and tortures with interest and compound interest, perhaps, in some cases, making the greenhorn into a parricide in thought by his post-obits, a fair specimen of an accomplished usurer, placed by Dante in a circle of the Inferno inhabited by very bad company indeed, and pelted with flakes of fiery snow. Well, I say that this man, though scarcely a lawbreaker, is an incorrigible criminal, an enemy of his kind, and it would be no more than justice to deal with him accordingly. Or take the case of thieving: one man steals a sheep, as Charles II. did at Boscobel, because he wants it to eat, or his little ones want it: he is corrigible. Another steals a widow’s mite in a bank, having seduced her into trusting him with it by a life of religious hypocrisy: this man is incorrigible, or corrigible only by the crank and a long course of penal discipline. Or take the very bad case of poisoning: a young woman was hung some years ago at Bristol for poisoning an old one who had frightfully and systematically maltreated her: no doubt the law did right, if it is right to hang women at all; but I do not look upon the case as necessarily incorrigible. But look at the case of a baker or a grocer who poisons the food of multitudes, at all events succeeding so far that he injures their health, and all for the sake of making a slight profit, from utter, cold, unmitigated selfishness. I say that such a man is incorrigible, and deserves to be hung, though whether or not it would be expedient to hang him is another question. Again, there is a manifest difference between old and young offenders committing the same crime, and I believe the usual practice recognises this difference. It does indeed seem to me unjust to punish at all little children, whom, in the spirit of our glorious constitution, we have left to be brought up by vicious parents, without being taught the difference between right and wrong, or rather, with having been taught to transpose these from the very first. We are all by nature liars and thieves, as much as these little children, and unless we had been taken in hand by kind parents and friends, who imitated in this only the example of a Greater, who ordered little children to be brought to Him, we should inevitably have grown up in the same moral ignorance. At the same time, a certain weight must be given to the fact that vice engenders vice as virtue does virtue, and that the human race is brutified by generations of evil living, as it deteriorates by living in a bad climate for many generations. The low stupid animal configuration is a sad puzzle to the philanthropist, the ragged schoolmaster, and the keeper of the juvenile prison; and the actually abandoned children of the metaphorically abandoned, appear often as hopeless of receiving instruction in better things as the Bushman or the New Guinea savage. Not that we need absolutely despair of any human being who retains a vestige of the human, which is indeed also a vestige of the godlike. He is still something more than an ourang-outang. Only when he fairly declares war against society, we have a manifest right to take his life, as we have the life of our enemies in international war, and on the principle of self-defence, not only against physical injury, but moral contamination. Now war is declared against society by certain definite overt acts, such as murder, and the existence of the incorrigible character, perpetually asserting, whether with truth or not, its incorrigibility. Although some who commit great crimes are doubtless corrigible, yet the world is not strong enough to pardon them, considering the greatness, or rather extreme dangerousness, of the acts they commit. And it is not the danger to life and property on which I would lay the greatest stress; it is the danger of their example to the crowd of waverers between guilt and innocence, which in fact comprises perhaps a quarter of mankind. Now, as long as they live, they are objects of a certain interest, and at least noticeable; whereas, had they ceased to live, they would be virtually and personally forgotten. If Madame Laffarge had been put to death for the poisoning of her husband, the crime of poisoning would have been in a manner put to death with her; whereas her perpetual imprisonment is a perpetual reminder of her offence. But it seems to some hard to put to death political offenders. So it is, if we consider the persons only and not the offence. But rebellion against established government is an act so very inconvenient to the interests of society that the law is doubtless in the right in making it a capital offence. And yet a rebel may be a glorious hero and genuine patriot. But no one ought to be allowed to assume this character cheaply. If he plays at all, he must stake his all, and be prepared, if he loses, for loss of head and confiscation of property. I readily admit that he may be a holy martyr if he loses, even as he is sure to be a very great man indeed if he wins: but no less should be the stake he plays for. Although I have a very high opinion of the French Emperor, and think that, having won, he most fully deserves to wear the position he holds, I think he would equally have deserved a bullet or the guillotine had he been unlucky. Nothing has done more harm in the case of murder than the foolish plea of insanity, and I do, from my heart, hope that Verger will suffer death for the murder of the Archbishop of Paris, a crime indeed complicated with sacrilege as committed at the altar of God, and parricide as committed by a priest against a spiritual father. The weak conduct of the poor Archbishop to this ungrateful ruffian, in suffering him to be appointed to a cure of souls, in spite of his manifest incorrigibleness, was well commented upon by the Times, and illustrates forcibly my general position. The man who murdered Mr Drummond some years ago (Macnaughten) ought to have been hung, as he had destroyed his moral sense by bad habits before he became insane, and his madness was evidently the child of his badness. Between the labials b and m there is not so wide a difference that the words are not often interchanged, and it would do no great harm in the world to kill, once in the way, a mad murderer, even if he is morally innocent, while it is productive of unending harm to suffer a bad one, who is assuredly morally guilty, to escape. It seems to me, then, that murder, no matter whether its subject be corrigible or not, always demands death; in case of treason the sentence must depend on political expediency. Our Government was quite strong enough to pardon Smith O’Brien, and doubtless did infinitely more good by remitting his sentence than by executing it; but still he would have no reason to complain had he been shot after a court-martial, by Inspector Trant, in the very cabbage-garden of the widow Cormack. Our Government did not so well in mitigating the penalties of the Chartists Frost and Co., who exposed a number of misguided men to be shot down, keeping out of fire themselves, and are still, as it appears, engaged in plotting mischief against the State. Arson should always be capital, because it is a crime of such portentous consequences, so easy to effect in these days of phosphoric appliances, and so entirely out of the pale of ordinary temptations. Whether any other offence should be punished with death should be decided by a reference to the character of the offender, and the circumstances under which it is committed. There are a great many crimes which, though slight in themselves, are evidences of a dangerous and hopeless brutality of character, and are even more so when committed in a state of intoxication, because it is in such a state that the real nature shows itself most strongly. I would cite as an example some furious assault on a wife by a drunken husband, who had starved her first to gratify his selfish appetites. Society might surely do without such a character, in a state of things where even the innocent have such a hard fight for existence. Again, it is difficult to decide on incorrigibility, and we are expressly forbidden by a higher law to judge the heart of man; but when incorrigibility is for ever declaring itself, and declaring war against society in the devil’s name, I think we should be justified, even if each overt offence were small in itself, and again, considering the difficulty of feeding our population, in putting it quietly out of the way. When Babylon was besieged, the government adopted the ungallant expedient of killing all the women except enough to bake bread for the fighting garrison; and as our modern Babylon is at present in a normal state of siege from the legions of darkness, perhaps the question is worth entertaining whether its incorrigible male population might not be abated by some short and summary method, even after our one great imaginary sweeping. Still, I will not insist on this point, for I fear to shock your feelings, Irenæus, and the prejudices which you imbibed in your early intercourse with the Society of Friends. And I cannot help imagining the reverend Celsus at my elbow with a face of unusual severity, admonishing me on religious grounds that we ought not to cut off from the wicked the hope of repentance, for we can never tell whether there be still room for it or not. Of course this argument would be tantamount to advocating the entire abolition of capital punishment. But what would you substitute? Solitary confinement? Would you convert a man by making him infallibly insane? Perpetual imprisonment and hard labour in company with others? Is he likely to think of his latter end in the company of those like himself? He is much more likely to laugh to scorn with them everything connected with it. What makes most of us so careless in these matters is, not that we believe we shall live for ever in this life, but that we do not know, for the next half-century or less, exactly when we shall die. But place certain death before our eyes at the distance of a month or so, and we should think it time, one and all, to make some arrangement of our affairs both for this world and the next. A prisoner confined in solitude or condemned to penal servitude for life is not likely to do himself any good, neither can he do good to the State, for keeping him and guarding him probably cost more than his hopeless labour. I forbear the deduction. It is a stern one, but I believe it to be true. The prisoner may ask for “a long day,” and have it, and benefit of clergy ought to be denied to none by those who have the thief on the cross before their eyes; nor ought the services of a national church, which buries all, as she baptises all, in charitable hope. Secondary punishments are of course a question of much detail and arrangement, and many plans have been proposed with regard to them, more or less sensible. It seems to me that means must be taken to banish from the country all criminals but the young and those convicted of trifling offences, or under great temptation, and to banish them for ever. First, they ought, properly classified and supervised, to be set to useful public works, and work out at home the term of their punishment, and then granted a passage to certain stated regions of the earth, not necessarily colonies, where the people would not object to receive them, if there were inhabitants already, and where they might, as it were, begin a new life under fairer auspices. Return to this country, under any circumstances whatever, should be punished by another and a very long lease of penal servitude. Nor should that penal servitude be too light, else it would be resorted to in some cases in order to effect an ultimate emigration. It should be very severe, but not untempered by relaxation both of mind and body; nor should the chaplain be the only reformer. I would have the musician, and even the actor of Shakespeare, to aid his efforts. Reparation and reformation are the two main objects of secondary punishments; nor is the more selfish protection of society, although important, to be weighed in the balance with them. If a crime is committed, according to divine law, it has to be expiated, sooner or later, in the person of the offender; and it can be no harm for human law to endeavour to be in harmony with the divine. After expiation, forgiveness may come, but not without it, both from man and God. God may forgive in any case, even the worst; but in the worst cases, man, conscious of his weakness, must submit to be unforgiving. As to lesser punishments, I have often wondered why that excellent summary process of flogging has fallen into such disrepute. Why should we have mercy on the skin of a man who has no mercy on the skin of his wife, and invest it with sacerdotal sanctity? And ought not cruelty to animals to be punished in kind, by scourging the animal that is cruel? As for the noble Stocks, which has become in most villages a significant ruin, it is a machine which seems to have been created expressly to curb the national vice of drunkenness. Put your silly Helot by all means in the stocks, and let all our young village Spartans have a good stare at him, especially at the time when he is beginning to get sick and sorry. No rotten eggs, if you please, far less a stone in a snowball! The poor fellow cannot run after you, and is sufficiently punished by the degrading exposure. I have no more time or paper, or I would say even more, Irenæus, on this subject of punishments; but I think you can see my general drift. After all, prevention is better than cure; and I would rather put another strain on our British freedom, and take away by force from their parents all the children who are being brought up under notoriously evil auspices; beginning by transporting them to be out of the way, and then bringing them back in ten or fifteen years’ time, if they wished to come back, to some other spot at home, far from the habitat of their parents, and not this till the death of their parents had been ascertained. But even they would perhaps do better in a new country, as would some of us, who have but a sort of struggle to live here, and yet very little of a moral nature the matter with us.

Farewell,

Your ever

TLEPOLEMUS.

THE ATHELINGS; OR, THE THREE GIFTS.

BOOK III.—PART IX.

CHAPTER I.—AN OLD STORY.

“Now, mother,” said Charlie, “I’m in real earnest. My father would tell me himself if he were here. I want to understand the whole concern.”

Mrs Atheling and her son were in Charlie’s little room, with its one small lattice-window, overshadowed and embowered in leaves—its plain uncurtained bed, its small table, and solitary chair. Upon this chair, with a palpitating heart, sat Mrs Atheling, and before her stood the resolute boy.

And she began immediately, yet with visible faltering and hesitation, to tell him the story she had told the girls of the early connection between the present Lord Winterbourne and the Atheling family. But Charlie’s mind was excited and preoccupied. He listened, almost with impatience, to the sad little romance of his father’s young sister, of whom he had never heard before. It did not move him at all as it had moved Agnes and Marian. Broken hearts and disappointed loves were very far out of Charlie’s way; something entirely different occupied his own imagination. He broke forth with a little effusion of impatience when the story came to an end. “And is this all? Do you mean to say this is the whole, mother? And my father had never anything to do with him but through a girl!”

“You are very unfeeling, Charlie,” said Mrs Atheling, who wiped her eyes with real emotion, yet with a little policy too, and to gain time. “She was a dear innocent girl, and your father was very fond of her—reason enough to give him a dislike, if it were not sinful, to the very name of Lord Winterbourne.”

“I had better go on with my packing, then,” said Charlie. “So, that was all? I suppose any scamp in existence might do the same. Do you really mean to tell me, mother, that there was nothing but this?”

Mrs Atheling faltered still more under the steady observation of her son. “Charlie,” said his mother, with agitation, “your father never would mention it to any one. I may be doing very wrong. If he only were here himself to decide! But if I tell you, you must give me your word never so much as to hint at it again.”

Charlie did not give the necessary pledge, but Mrs Atheling made no pause. She did not even give him time to speak, however he might have been inclined, but hastened on in her own disclosure with agitation and excitement. “You have heard Papa tell of the young gentleman—he whom you all used to be so curious about—whom your father did a great benefit to,” said Mrs Atheling, in a breathless hurried whisper. “Charlie, my dear, I never said it before to any creature—that was him.”

She paused only a moment to take breath. “It was before we knew how he had behaved to dear little Bride,” she continued, still in haste, and in an undertone. “What he did was a forgery—a forgery! people were hanged for it then. It was either a bill, or a cheque, or something, and Mr Reginald had written to it another man’s name. It happened when Papa was in the bank, and before old Mr Lombard died—old Mr Lombard had a great kindness for your father, and we had great hopes then—and by good fortune the thing was brought to Papa. Your father was always very quick, Charlie, he found it out in a moment. So he told old Mr Lombard of it in a quiet way, and Mr Lombard consented he should take it back to Mr Reginald, and tell him it was found out, and hush all the business up. If your Papa had not been so quick, Charlie, but had paid the money at once, as almost any one else would have done, it all must have been found out, and he would have been hanged, as certain as anything—he, a haughty young gentleman, and a lord’s son!”

“And a very good thing, too,” exclaimed Charlie; “saved him from doing any more mischief. So, I suppose now, it’s all my father’s blame.”

“This Lord Winterbourne is a bad man,” said Mrs Atheling, taking no notice of her son’s interruption—“first he was furious to William, and then he cringed and fawned to him; and of course he had it on his conscience then about poor little Bride, though we did not know—and then he raved, and said he was desperate, and did not know what to do for money. Your father came home to me, quite unhappy about him; for he belonged to the same country, and everybody tried to make excuses for Mr Reginald, being a young man, and the heir. So William made it up in his own mind to go and tell the old lord, who was in London then. The old lord was a just man, but very proud. He did not take it kind of William, and he had no regard for Mr Reginald; but for the honour of the family he sent him away. Then we lost sight of him long, and Aunt Bridget took a dislike to us, and poor little Bride was dead, and we never heard anything of the Lodge or the Hall for many a year; but the old lord died abroad, and Mr Reginald came home Lord Winterbourne. That was all we ever knew. I thought your father had quite forgiven him, Charlie—we had other things to think of than keeping up old grudges—when all at once it came to be in the newspapers that Lord Winterbourne was a political man, that he was making speeches everywhere, and that he was to be one of the ministry. When your father saw that, he blazed up into such an anger! I said all I could, but William never minded me. He never was so bitter before, not even when we heard of little Bride. He said, Such a man to govern us and all the people!—a forger! a liar!—and sometimes, I think, he thought he would expose the whole story, and let everybody know.”

“Time enough for that,” said Charlie, who had listened to all this without comment, but with the closest attention. “What he did once he’ll do again, mother; but we’re close at his heels this time, and he won’t get off now. I’m going to Oxford now to get some books. I say, mother, you’ll be sure, upon your honour, not to tell the girls?”

“No, Charlie,” said Mrs Atheling, with a somewhat faint affirmation; “but, my dear, I can’t believe in it. It can’t be true. Charlie, boy! if this was coming true, our Marian—your sister, Charlie!—why, Marian would be Lady Winterbourne!”

Charlie did not say a word in return; he only took down his little travelling-bag, laid it at his mother’s feet to be packed, and left her to that business and her own meditations; but after he had left the room, the lad returned again and thrust in his shaggy head at the door. “Take care of Marian, mother,” said Charlie, in a parting adjuration; “remember my father’s little sister Bride.”

So he went away, leaving Mrs Atheling a good deal disquieted. She had got over the first excitement of Miss Anastasia’s great intelligence and the sudden preparations of Charlie. She had scarcely time enough, indeed, to give a thought to these things, when her son demanded this history from her, and sent her mind away into quite a different channel. Now she sat still in Charlie’s room, pondering painfully, with the travelling-bag lying quite unheeded at her feet. At one moment she pronounced the whole matter perfectly impossible—at the next, triumphantly inconsequent, she leaped to the full consummation of the hope, and saw her own pretty Marian—dazzling vision!—the lady of Winterbourne! and again the heart of the good mother fell, and she remembered little Bride. Louis, as he was now, having no greater friends than their own simple family, and no pretensions whatever either to birth or fortune, was a very different person from that other Louis who might be heir of lands and lordship and the family pride of the Riverses. Much perplexed, in great uncertainty and pain, mused Mrs Atheling, half-resentful of that grand discovery of Miss Anastasia, which might plunge them all into renewed trouble; while Charlie trudged into Oxford for his Italian grammar—and Louis and Marian wandered through the enchanted wood, drawing homeward—and Rachel sang to the children—and Agnes wondered by herself over the secret which was to be confided only to mamma.

CHAPTER II.—A CRISIS.

That night Charlie had need of all his diplomatic talents. Before he returned from Oxford, his mother, by way of precaution lest Agnes should betray the sudden and mysterious visit of Miss Anastasia to Marian, contrived to let her elder daughter know mysteriously, something of the scope and object of the sudden journey for which it was necessary to prepare her brother, driving Agnes, as was to be supposed, into a very fever of suppressed excitement, joy, triumph, and anxiety. Mrs Atheling, conscious, hurried, and studying deeply not to betray herself—and Agnes, watching every one, stopping questions, and guarding off suspicions with prudence much too visible—were quite enough of themselves to rouse every other member of the little company to lively pursuit after the secret. Charlie was assailed by every shape and form of question: Where was he going—what was he to do? He showed no cleverness, we are bound to acknowledge, in evading these multitudinous interrogations; he turned an impenetrable front upon them, and made the most commonplace answers, making vast incursions all the time into Hannah’s cakes and Mamma’s bread-and-butter.

“He had to go back immediately to the office; he believed he had got a new client for old Foggo,” said Charlie, with the utmost coolness; “making no secret of it at all,” according to Mamma’s indignant commentary.

“To the office!—are you only going home, after all?” cried Marian.

“I’ll see when I get there,” answered Charlie; “there’s something to be done abroad. I shouldn’t wonder if they sent me. I say, I wish you’d all come home at once, and make things comfortable. There’s my poor father fighting it out with Susan. I should not stand it if it was me.”

“Hold your peace, Charlie, and don’t be rude,” said Mrs Atheling. “But, indeed, I wish we were at home, and out of everybody’s way.”

“Who is everybody?” said Louis. “I, who am going myself, can wish quite sincerely that we were all at home; but the addition is mysterious—who is in anybody’s way?”

“Mamma means to wish us all out of reach of the Evil Eye,” said Agnes, a little romantically.

“No such thing, my dear. I daresay we could do him a great deal more harm than he can do us,” said Mrs Atheling, with sudden importance and dignity; then she paused with a certain solemnity, so that everybody could perceive the grave self-restraint of the excellent mother, and that she could say a great deal more if she chose.

“But no one thinks what I am to do when you are all gone,” said Rachel; and her tearful face happily diverted her companions from investigating and from concealing the secret. There remained among them all, however, a certain degree of excitement. Charlie was returning home to-morrow—specially called home on business!—perhaps to go abroad upon the same! The fact stirred all those young hearts with something not unlike envy. This boy seemed to have suddenly leaped in one day into a man.

And it was natural enough that, hearing of this, the mind of Louis should burn and chafe with fierce impatience. Charlie, who was perfectly undemonstrative of his thoughts and imaginations, was a very boy to Louis—yet there was need and occasion for Charlie in the crowd of life, when no one thought upon this fiery and eager young man. It was late that night when Louis left this only home and haven which he had ever known; and though he would fain have left Rachel there, his little sister would not remain behind him, but clung to his arm with a strange presentiment of something about to happen, which she could not explain. Louis scarcely answered a word to the quiet talk of Rachel as they went upon their way to the Hall. With difficulty, and even with impatience, he curbed his rapid stride to her timid little footsteps, and hurried her along without a glance at the surrounding scene, memorable and striking as it was. The broad moonlight flooded over the noble park of Winterbourne. The long white-columned front of the house—which was a great Grecian house, pallid, vast, and imposing—shone in the white light like a screen of marble; and on the great lawn immediately before it were several groups of people, dwarfed into minute miraculous figures by the great space and silence, and the intense illumination, which was far more striking and particular than the broader light of day. The chances were that Louis did not see them, as he plunged on, in the blindness of preoccupation, keeping no path, through light and shadow, through the trees and underwood, and across the broad unshaded greensward, where no one could fail to perceive him. His little sister clung to his arm in an agony of fear, grief, and confidence—trembling for something about to happen with an overpowering tremor—yet holding a vague faith in her brother, strange and absorbing. She said, “Louis, Louis!” in her tone of appeal and entreaty. He did not hear her, but struck across the broad visible park, in the full stream of the moonlight, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left. As they approached, Rachel could not even hear any conversation among the groups on the lawn; and it was impossible to suppose that they had not been seen. Louis’s abrupt direct course, over the turf and through the brushwood, must have attracted the notice of bystanders even in the daylight; it was still more remarkable now, when noiseless and rapid, through the intense white radiance and the perfect stillness, the stately figure of the young man, and his timid, graceful little sister, came directly forward in face of the spectators. These spectators were all silent, looking on with a certain fascination, and Rachel could not tell whether Louis was even conscious that any one was there.

But before they could turn aside into the road which led to the Hall door—a road to which Rachel most anxiously endeavoured to guide her brother—they were suddenly arrested by the voice of Lord Winterbourne. “I must put a stop to this,” said his lordship suddenly and loudly, with so evident a reference to themselves, that even Rachel stopped without knowing it. “Here, young fellow, stop and give an account of yourself—what do you mean by wandering about my park at midnight, eh? I know your poaching practices. Setting snares, I suppose, and dragging about this girl as a protection. Get into your kennel, you mean dog; is this how you repay the shelter I have given you all your life?”

“It would be a fit return,” said Louis. He did not speak so loud, but with a tremble of scorn and bitterness and intense youthful feeling in his voice, before which the echo of his persecutor’s went out and died, like an ignoble thing. “If I were, as you say,” repeated the young man—“setting snares for your game, or for your wealth, or for your life, you know it would be a fit return.”

“Yes, I live a peaceful life with this villanous young incendiary under my roof!” said Lord Winterbourne. “I’ll tell you what, you young ruffian, if nothing better can restrain you, locks and bars shall. Oh, no chance of appealing to my pity, with that fool of a girl upon your arm! You think you can defy me, year after year, because I have given charity to your base blood. My lad, you shall learn to know me better before another week is over our heads. Why, gentlemen, you perceive, by his own confession, I stand in danger of my life.”

“Winterbourne,” said some one over his shoulder, in a reproving tone, “you should be the last man in the world to taunt this unfortunate lad with his base blood.”

Lord Winterbourne turned upon his heel with a laugh of insult which sent the wild blood dancing in an agony of shame, indignation, and rage even into Rachel’s woman’s face. “Well,” said the voice of their tyrant, “I have supported the hound—what more would you have? His mother was a pretty fool, but she had her day. There’s more of her conditions in the young villain than mine. I have no idea of playing the romantic father to such a son—not I!”

Louis did not know that he threw his sister off his arm before he sprang into the midst of these half-dozen gentlemen. She did not know herself, as she stood behind clenching her small fingers together painfully, with all the burning vehemence of a woman’s passion. The young man sprang forward with the bound of a young tiger. His voice was hoarse with passion, not to be restrained. “It is a lie—a wilful, abominable lie!” cried Louis fiercely, confronting as close as a wrestler the ghastly face of his tyrant, who shrank before him. “I am no son of yours—you know I am no son of yours! I owe you the hateful bread I have been compelled to eat—nothing more. I am without a name—I may be of base blood—but I warn you for your life, if you dare repeat this last insult. It is a lie! I tell every one who condescends to call you friend; and I appeal to God, who knows that you know it is a lie! I may be the son of any other wretch under heaven, but I am not yours. I disown it with loathing and horror. Do you hear me?—you know the truth in your heart, and so do I!”

Lord Winterbourne fell back, step by step, before the young man, who pressed upon him close and rapid, with eyes which flamed and burned with a light which he could not bear. The insulting smile upon his bloodless face had not passed from it yet. His eyes, shifting, restless, and uneasy, expressed nothing. He was not a coward, and he was sufficiently quick-witted on ordinary occasions, but he had nothing whatever to answer to this vehement and unexpected accusation. He made an unintelligible appeal with his hand to his companions, and lifted up his face to the moonlight like a spectre, but he did not answer by a single word.

“Young man,” said the gentleman who had spoken before, “I acknowledge your painful position, and that you have been addressed in a most unseemly manner—but no provocation should make you forget your natural duty. Lord Winterbourne must have had a motive for maintaining you as he has done. I put it to you calmly, dispassionately—what motive could he possibly have had, except one?”

“Ah!” said Louis, with a sudden and violent start, “he must have had a motive—it is true; he would not waste his cruel powers, even for cruelty’s sake. If any man can tell me what child it was his interest to bastardise and defame, there may be hope and a name for me yet.”

At these words, Lord Winterbourne advanced suddenly with a singular eagerness. “Let us have done with this foolery,” he said in a voice which was certainly less steady than usual; “I presume we can all be better employed than listening to the vapourings of this foolish boy. Go in, my lad, and learn a lesson by your folly to-night. I pass it over, simply because you have shown yourself to be a fool.”

“I, however, do not pass it over, my lord,” said Louis, who had calmed down after the most miraculous fashion, to the utter amazement of his sister. “Thank you for the provision you have given us, such as it is. Some time we may settle scores upon that subject. My sister and I must find another shelter to-night.”

The bystanders were half disposed to smile at the young man’s heroical withdrawal—but they were all somewhat amazed to find that Lord Winterbourne was as far as possible from sharing their amusement. He called out immediately in an access of passion to stop the young ruffian, incendiary, mischief-maker;—called loudly upon the servants, who began to appear at the open door—ordered Louis to his own apartment with the most unreasonable vehemence, and finally turned upon Rachel, calling her to give up the young villain’s arm, and for her life to go home.

But Rachel was wound to the fever point as well as her brother. “No, no, it is all true he has said,” cried Rachel. “I know it, like Louis; we are not your children—you dare not call us so now. I never believed you were our father—never all my life.”

She exclaimed these words hastily in her low eager voice, as Louis drew her arm through his, and hurried her away. The young man struck again across the broad park and through the moonlight, while behind, Lord Winterbourne called to his servants to go after the fugitives—to bring that fellow back. The men only stared at their master, looked helplessly at each other, and went off on vain pretended searches, with no better intention than to keep out of Louis’s way, until prudence came to the aid of Lord Winterbourne. “I shall scarcely think my life in safety while that young fool wanders wild about the country,” he said to his friends, as he returned within doors; but his friends, one and all, thought this a very odd scene.

Meanwhile Louis made his rapid way with his little sister on his arm out over the glorious moonlit park of Winterbourne, away from the only home he had ever known—out to the night and to the world. Rachel, leaning closely upon him, scarcely so much as looked up, as her faltering footstep toiled to keep up with her brother. He, holding his proud young head high, neither turned nor glanced aside, but pressed on straight forward, as if to some visionary certain end before his eye. Then they came out at last to the white silent road, lying ghostlike under the excess of light—the quiet road which led through the village where all the houses slept and everything was still, not a curl of smoke in the moonlight, nor a house-dog’s bark in the silence. It was midnight, vast and still, a great desolate uninhabited world. There was not a door open to them, nor a place where they could rest. But on pressed Louis, with the rapid step and unhesitating course of one who hastened to some definite conclusion. “Where are we going—where shall we go?” said poor little Rachel, drooping on his shoulder. Her brother did not hear her. He was not selfish, but he had not that superhuman consideration for others which might have broken the fiery inspiration of his own momentous thoughts, and made him think of the desolate midnight, and the houseless and outcast condition which were alone present to the mind of Rachel. He did not see a vast homeless solitude—a vagabond and disgraceful wandering, in this midnight walk. He saw a new world before him, such as had never glanced before across his fancy. “He must have had a notion” he muttered to himself. Rachel heard him sadly, and took the words as a matter of course. “Where are we to go?”—that was a more immediately important question to the simple mind of Rachel.

The Old Wood Lodge was as deep asleep as any house in the village. They paused, reluctant, both of them, to awake their friends within, and went back, pacing rapidly between the house of the Athelings and that of the Rector. The September night was cold, and Rachel was timid of that strange midnight world out of doors. They seemed to have nothing for it but pacing up and down upon the grassy road, where they were at least within sight of a friendly habitation, till morning came.

There was one light in one window of the Old Wood House; Rachel’s eye went wandering to it wistfully, unawares: If the Rector knew—the Rector, who once would have been kind if Louis would have let him. But as if in very response to her thoughts, the Rector, when they came back to this point again, was standing, like themselves, in the moonlight, looking over the low wall. He called to them rather authoritatively, asking what they did there—but started, and changed his tone into one of wondering interest and compassion when Rachel lifted her pale face to him, with the tears in her eyes. He hastened to the gate at once, and called them to enter. “Nay, nay, no hesitation—come in at once, that she may have rest and shelter,” said the Rector in a peremptory tone, which for the first time in his life Louis had no thought of resenting. He went in without a word, leading his little sister. Perhaps it was the first great thing that ever had been done in all her life for Rachel’s sake—for the sake of the delicate girl, who was half a child though a woman in years,—for sake of her tenderness, her delicate frame, her privilege of weakness. The two haughty young men went in silently together into this secluded house, which never opened its doors to any guest. It was an invalid’s home, and some one was always at hand for its ailing mistress. By-and-by Rachel, in the exhaustion of great excitement, fell asleep in a little quiet room looking over that moonlit park of Winterbourne. Louis, who was in no mood for sleep, watched below, full of eager and unquiet thoughts. They had left Winterbourne Hall suddenly; the Rector asked no further questions, expressed no wonder, and left the young man who had repelled him once, with a lofty and dignified hospitality, to his meditations or repose.

CHAPTER III.—CHARLIE’S PREPARATIONS.

Charlie Atheling was not at all of an imaginative or fanciful turn of mind. His slumbers were not disturbed by castle-building—he wasted none of his available time in making fancy sketches of the people, or the circumstances, among which he was likely to be thrown. He was not without the power of comprehending at a glance the various features of his mission; but by much the most remarkable point of Charlie’s character was his capacity for doing his immediate business, whatever that might be, with undivided attention, and with his full powers. On this early September morning he neither occupied himself with anticipations of his interview with Miss Anastasia, nor his hurried journey. He did not suffer his mind to stray to difficult questions of evidence, nor wander off into speculations concerning what he might have to do when he reached the real scene of his investigation. What he had to do at the moment he did like a man, bending upon his serious business all the faculties of his mind, and all the furrows of his brow. He got up at six o’clock, not because he particularly liked it, but because these early morning hours had become his habitual time for extra work of every kind, and sat upon Hannah’s bench in the garden, close by the kitchen door, with the early sun and the early wind playing hide-and-seek among his elf-locks, learning his Italian grammar, as if this was the real business for which he came into the world.

“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do”—that was Charlie’s secret of success. He had only a grammar, a dictionary, and a little New Testament in Italian—and he had not at this moment the slightest ambition to read Dante in the original—but with steady energy he chased those unknown verbs into the deep caverns of his memory—a memory which was prodigious, and lost nothing committed to it. The three books accompanied him when he went in to breakfast, and marched off in his pocket to Oxford when it was time to keep his appointment with Miss Anastasia. Meanwhile the much-delayed travelling-bag only now began to get packed, and Mrs Atheling, silently toiling at this business, felt convinced that Susan would mislay all the things most important for Charlie’s comfort, and very much yearned in her heart to accompany her son home. They were to meet him at the railway, whence he would depart immediately, after his interview with Miss Rivers; and Charlie’s secret commission made a considerable deal of excitement in the quiet little house.

Miss Anastasia, who was much too eager and impetuous to be punctual, had been waiting for some time, when her young agent made his appearance at the office of her solicitor. After she had charged him with being too late, and herself suffered conviction as being too early, the old lady proceeded at once to business; they were in Mr Temple’s own room, but they were alone.

“I have made copies of everything that seemed to throw light upon my late father’s wanderings,” said Miss Anastasia—“not much to speak of—see! These papers must have been carefully weeded before they came to my hands. Here is an old guidebook marked with notes, and here a letter dated from the place where he died. It is on the borders of Italy—at the foot of the Alps—on the way to Milan, and not very far from there. You will make all speed, young Atheling; I trust to your prudence—betray nothing—do not say a word about these children until you find some certain clue. It is more than twenty years—nearly one-and-twenty years—since my father died; but a rich Englishman, who married among them, was not like to be forgotten in such a village. Find out who this Giulietta was—if you can discover the family, they might know something. My father had an attendant, a sort of courier, who was with us often—Jean Monte, half a Frenchman half an Italian. I have never heard of him since that time; he might be heard of on the way, and he might know—but I cannot direct you, boy—I trust to your own spirit, your own foresight, your own prudence. Make haste, as if it was life and death; yet if time will avail you, take time. Now, young Atheling, I trust you!—bring clear evidence—legal evidence—what will stand in a court of law—and as sure as you live your fortune is made!”

Charlie did not make a single protestation in answer to this address. He folded up carefully those fragments of paper copied out in Miss Anastasia’s careful old-fashioned lady’s hand, and placed them in the big old pocket-book which he carried for lack of a better.

“I don’t know much of the route,” said Charlie,—“over the Alps, I suppose,” and for once his cheek flushed with the youthful excitement of the travel. “I shall find out all about that immediately when I get to town; and there is a passport to be seen after. When I am ready to start—which will be just as soon as the thing can be done—I shall let you know how I am to travel, and write immediately when I arrive there;—I know what you mean me to do.”

Then Miss Anastasia gave him—(a very important part of the business),—two ten-pound notes, which was a very large sum to Charlie, and directed him to go to the banking-house, with which she kept an account in London, and get from them a letter of credit on a banker in Milan, on whom he could draw, according to his occasions. “You are very young, young Atheling,” said Miss Rivers; “many a father would hesitate to trust his son as I trust you; but I’m a woman and an optimist, and have my notions: you are only a boy, but I believe in you—forget how young you are while you are about my business—plenty of time after this for enjoying yourself—and I tell you again, if you do your duty, your fortune is made.”

The old lady and the youth went out together, to where the little carriage and the grey ponies stood at the solicitor’s door. Charlie, in his present development, was not at all the man to hand a lady with a grace to her carriage; nor was this stately gentlewoman, in her brown pelisse, at all the person to be so escorted; but they were a remarkable pair enough, as they stood upon the broad pavement of one of the noblest streets of Christendom. Miss Anastasia held out her hand with a parting command and warning, as she took her seat and the reins.—“Young Atheling, remember! it is life and death!”

She was less cautious at that moment than she had been during all their interview. The words fell upon another ear than his to whom they were addressed. Lord Winterbourne was making his way at the moment with some newly arrived guests of his, and under the conduct of a learned pundit from one of the colleges, along this same picturesque High Street; and, in the midst of exclamations of rapture and of interest, his suspicious and alarmed eye caught the familiar equipage and well-known figure of Miss Anastasia. Her face was turned in the opposite direction,—she did not see him,—but a single step brought him near enough to hear her words. “Young Atheling!” Lord Winterbourne had not forgotten his former connection with the name, but the remembrance had long lain dormant in a breast which was used to potent excitements. William Atheling, though he once saved a reckless young criminal, could do no harm with his remote unbelievable story to a peer of the realm;—a man who had sat in the councils of the State. Lord Winterbourne had begun his suit for the Old Wood Lodge with the most contemptuous indifference to all that could be said of him by anyone of this family; yet somehow it struck him strangely to hear so sudden a naming of this name. “Young Atheling!” He could not help looking at the youth,—meeting the stormy gleam in the eyes of Charlie, whose sudden enmity sprung up anew in an instant. Lord Winterbourne was sufficiently disturbed already by the departure of Louis, and with the quick observation of alarm remarked everything. He could understand no natural connection whatever between this lad and Miss Anastasia. His startled imagination suggested instantly that it bore some reference to Louis, and what interpretation was it possible to give to so strange an adjuration—“It is life and death!”

CHAPTER IV.—GOING AWAY.

“Charlie, my dear boy,” said Mrs Atheling, with a slight tremble in her voice, “I suppose it may be months before we see you again.”

“I can’t tell, mother; but it will not be a day longer than I can help,” said Charlie, who had the grace to be serious at the moment of parting. “There’s only one thing, you know,—I must do my business before I come home.”

“And take care of yourself,” said Mrs Atheling; “take great care when you are going over those mountains, and among those people where bandits are—you know what stories we have read about such robbers, Charlie,—and remember, though I should be very glad to hear good news about Louis, Louis is not my own very boy, like you.”

“Hush, mother—no need for naming him,” said Charlie; “he is of more moment than me, however, this time—for that’s my business. Never fear—thieves may be fools there as well as at home, but they’re none such fools as to meddle with me. Now, mother, promise me, the last thing,—Agnes, do you hear?—don’t tell Marian a word, nor him. I’ll tell old Foggo the whole story, and Foggo will do what he can for him when he gets to London; but don’t you go and delude him, telling him of this, for it would just be as good as ruin if I don’t succeed; and it all may come to nothing, as like as not. I say, Agnes, do you hear?”

“Yes, I hear, very well; but I am not given to telling secrets,” said Agnes, with a little dignity.

Charlie only laughed as he arranged himself in the corner of the second-class carriage, and drew forth his grammar: there was no time for anything more, save entreaties that he would write, and take care of himself; and the train flashed away, leaving them somewhat dull and blank in the reaction of past excitement, looking at each other, and half reluctant to turn their faces homeward. Their minds hurried forth faster than either steam or electricity to the end of Charlie’s journey. They went back with very slow steps and very abstracted minds. What a new world of change and sudden revolution might open upon them at Charlie’s return!

Mrs Atheling had some business in the town, and the mother and daughter pursued their way silently to that same noble High Street where Charlie had seen Lord Winterbourne, and where Lord Winterbourne and his party were still to be caught sight of, appearing and reappearing by glimpses as they “did” the halls and colleges. While her mother managed some needful business in a shop, Agnes stood rather dreamily looking down the stately street; its strange old-world mixture of the present and the past; its union of all kinds of buildings; the trim classic pillars and toy cupolas of the eighteenth century—the grim crumbling front of elder days—the gleams of green grass and waving trees through college gateways—the black-gowned figures interrupting the sunshine—the beautiful spire striking up into it as into its natural element,—a noble hyacinthine stem of immortal flowers. Agnes did not know much about artistic effect, nor anything about orders of architecture, but the scene seized upon her imagination, as was its natural right. Her thoughts were astray among hopes and chances far enough out of the common way—but any dream of romance could make itself real in an atmosphere like this.

She was pale,—she was somewhat of an abstracted and musing aspect. When one took into consideration her misfortune of authorship, she was in quite a sentimental pose and attitude—so thought her American acquaintance, who had managed to secure an invitation to the Hall, and was one of Lord Winterbourne’s party. But Mr Endicott had “done” all the colleges before, and he could afford to let his attention be distracted by the appearance of the literary sister of the lady of his love.

“I am not surprised at your abstraction,” said Mr Endicott. “In this, indeed, I do not hesitate to confess, my country is not equal to your Island. What an effect of sunshine! what a breadth of shade! I cannot profess to have any preference, in respect to Art, for the past, picturesque though it be—a poet of these days, Miss Atheling, has not to deal with facts, but feelings; but I have no doubt, before I interrupted you, the whole panorama of History glided before your meditative eye.”

“No, indeed; I was thinking more of the future than of the past,” said Agnes hurriedly.

“The future of this nation is obscure and mysterious,” said Mr Endicott, gathering his eyebrows solemnly. “Some man must arise to lead you—to glory—or to perdition! I see nothing but chaos and darkness; but why should I prophesy? A past generation had leisure to watch the signs of the times; but for us ‘Art is long and time is fleeting,’ and happy is the man who can snatch one burning experience from the brilliant mirage of life.”

Agnes, a little puzzled by this mixture of images, did not attempt any answer. Mr Endicott went on.

“I had begun to observe, with a great deal of interest, two remarkable young minds placed in a singular position. They were not to be met, of course, at the table of Lord Winterbourne,” said the American with dignity; “but in my walks about the park I sometimes encountered them, and always endeavoured to draw them into conversation. So remarkable, in fact, did they seem to me, that they found a place in my letters from England; studies of character entirely new to my consciousness. I believe, Miss Atheling, I had once the pleasure of seeing them in your company. They stand—um—unfortunately in a—a—an equivocal relationship to my noble host.”

“Ah! what of them?” cried Agnes quickly, and with a crimsoned cheek. She felt already how difficult it was to hear them spoken of, and not proclaim at once her superior knowledge.

“A singular event, I understand, happened last night,” continued Mr Endicott. “Viscount Winterbourne, on his own lawn, was attacked and insulted by the young man, who afterwards left the house under very remarkable circumstances. My noble friend, who is an admirable example of an old English nobleman, was at one time in actual danger, and I believe has been advised to put this fiery youth—”

“Do you mean Louis?” cried Agnes, interrupting him anxiously. “Louis!—do you mean that he has left the Hall?”

“I am greatly interested, I assure you, in tracing out this romance of real life,” said Mr Endicott. “He left the Hall, I understand, last evening—and my noble friend is advised to take measures for his apprehension. I look upon the whole history with the utmost interest. How interesting to trace the motives of this young mind, perhaps the strife of passions—gratitude mixing with a sense of injury! If he is secured, I shall certainly visit him: I know no nobler subject for a drama of passion; and dramas of the passions are what we want to ennoble this modern time.”

“Mother!” cried Agnes, “mother! come; we have no time to lose—Mr Endicott has told me—Mamma, leave these things to another time. Marian is alone; there is no one to support her. Oh, mother, mother! make haste! We must go home!”

She scarcely gave a glance to Mr Endicott as he stood somewhat surprised, making a study of the young author’s excitable temperament for his next “letter from England”—but hastened her mother homeward, explaining, as she went, though not very coherently, that Louis had attacked Lord Winterbourne—that he had left the Hall—that he had done something for which he might be apprehended. The terror of disgrace—that most dread of all fears to people in their class—overwhelmed both mother and daughter, as they hastened, at a very unusual pace, along the road, terrified to meet himself in custody, or some one coming to tell them of his crime. And Marian, their poor beautiful flower, on whom this storm would fall so heavily—Marian was alone!

CHAPTER V.—THE OLD WOOD HOUSE.

Louis passed the night in the Rector’s library. He had no inclination for sleep; indeed, he was almost scornful of the idea that he could sleep under his new and strange circumstances; and it was not until he roused himself, with a start, to see that the pale sheen of the moonlight had been succeeded by the rosy dawn of morning, that he knew of the sudden, deep slumber, that had fallen upon him. It was morning, but it was still a long time till day; except the birds among the trees there was nothing astir, not even the earliest labourer, and he could not hear a sound in the house. All the events of the previous night returned upon Louis’s mind with all the revived freshness of a sudden awaking. A great change had passed upon him in a few hours. He started now at once out of the indefinite musings, the flush of vain ambition, the bitter brooding over wrong which had been familiar to his mind. He began to think with the earnest precision of a man who has attained to a purpose. Formerly it had been hard enough for his proud undisciplined spirit, prescient of something greater, to resolve upon a plan of tedious labour for daily bread, or to be content with such a fortune as had fallen to such a man as Mr Atheling. Even with love to bear him out, and his beautiful Marian to inspire him, it was hard, out of all the proud possibilities of youth, to plunge into such a lot as this. Now he considered it warily, with the full awakened consciousness of a man. Up to this time his bitter dislike and opposition to Lord Winterbourne had been carried on by fits and starts, as youths do contend with older people under whose sway they have been all their life. He took no reason with him when he decided that he was not the son of the man who opposed him. He never entered into the question how he came to the Hall, or what was the motive of its master. He had contented himself with a mere unreasoning conviction that Lord Winterbourne was not his father; but only one word was wanted to awaken the slumbering mind of the youth, and that word had been spoken last night. Now a clear and evident purpose became visible before him. What was Lord Winterbourne’s reason for keeping him all his life under so killing a bondage? What child was there in the world whom it was Lord Winterbourne’s interest to call illegitimate, and keep in obscurity? His heart swelled—the colour rose in his face. He did not see how hopeless was the search—how entirely without grounds, without information, he was. He did not perceive how vain, to every reasonable individual, would seem the fabric he had built upon a mere conviction of his own. In his own eager perception everything was possible to that courage, and perseverance indomitable, which he felt to be in him; and, for the first time in his life, Louis came down from the unreasonable and bitter pride which had shut his heart against all overtures of friendship. Friendship—help—advice—the aid of those who knew the world better than he did—these were things to be sought for, and solicited now. He sat in the Rector’s chair, leaning upon the Rector’s writing-table; it was not without a struggle that he overcame his old repugnance, his former haughtiness. It was not without a pang that he remembered the obligation under which this stranger had laid him. It was his first effort in self-control, and it was not an easy one; he resolved at last to ask counsel from the Rector, and lay fully before him the strange circumstances in which he stood.

The Rector was a man of capricious hours, and uncertain likings. He was sometimes abroad as early as the earliest ploughman; to-day it was late in the forenoon before he made his appearance. Breakfast had been brought to Louis, by himself, in the library; in this house they were used to solitary meals at all hours—and he had already asked several times for the Rector, when Mr Rivers at last entered the room, and saluted him with stately courtesy. “My sister, I find, has detained your sister,” said the Rector. “I hope you have not been anxious—they tell me the young lady will join us presently.”

Then there was a pause; and then Mr Rivers began an extremely polite and edifying conversation, which must have reminded any spectator of the courtly amity of a couple of Don Quixotes preparing for the duello. The Rector himself conducted it with the most solemn gravity imaginable. This Lionel Rivers, dissatisfied and self-devouring, was not a true man. Supposing himself to be under a melancholy necessity of disbelieving on pain of conscience, he yet submitted to an innumerable amount of practical shams, with which his conscience took no concern. In spite of his great talents, and of a character full of natural nobleness, when you came to its foundations, a false tone, an artificial strain of conversation, an unreal and insincere expression, were unhappily familiar enough to the dissatisfied clergyman, who vainly tried to anchor himself upon the authority of the Church. Louis, on the contrary, knew nothing of talk which was a mere veil and concealment of meaning; he could not use vain words when his heart burned within him; he had no patience for those conversations which were merely intended to occupy time, and which meant and led to nothing. Yet it was very difficult for him, young, proud, and inexperienced as he was, without any invitation or assistance from his companion, to enter upon his explanation. He changed colour, he became uneasy, he scarcely answered the indifferent remarks addressed to him. At length, seeing nothing better for it, he plunged suddenly and without comment into his own tale.

“We have left Winterbourne Hall,” said Louis, reddening to his temples as he spoke. “I have long been aware how unsuitable a home it was for me. I am going to London immediately. I cannot thank you enough for your hospitality to my sister, and to myself, last night.”

“That is nothing,” said the Rector, with a motion of his hand. “Some time since I had the pleasure of saying to your friends in the Lodge that it would gratify me to be able to serve you. I do not desire to pry into your plans; but if I can help you in town, let me know without hesitation.”

“So far from prying,” said Louis eagerly, interrupting him, “I desire nothing more than to explain them. All my life,” and once again the red blood rushed to the young man’s face,—“all my life I have occupied the most humiliating of positions—you know it. I am not a meek man by nature; what excuse I have had if a bitter pride has sometimes taken possession of me, you know——”

The Rector bowed gravely, but did not speak. Louis continued in haste, and with growing agitation, “I am not the son of Lord Winterbourne—I am not a disgraced offshoot of your family—I can speak to you without feeling shame and abasement in the very sound of your name. This has been my conviction since ever I was capable of knowing anything—but Heaven knows how subtly the snare was woven—it seemed impossible, until now when we have done it, to disengage our feet.”

“Have you made any discovery, then? What has happened?” said the Rector, roused into an eager curiosity. Here, at the very outset, lay Louis’s difficulty—and he had never perceived it before.

“No; I have made no discovery,” he said, with a momentary disconcertment. “I have only left the Hall—I have only told Lord Winterbourne what he knows well, and I have known long, that I am not his son.”

“Exactly—but how did you discover that?” said the Rector.

“I have discovered nothing—but I am as sure of it as that I breathe,” answered Louis.

The Rector looked at him—looked at a portrait which hung directly above Louis’s head upon the wall, smiled, and shook his head. “It is quite natural,” he said; “I can sympathise with any effort you make to gain a more honourable position, and to disown Lord Winterbourne—but it is vain where there are pictures of the Riverses to deny your connection with my family. George Rivers himself, my lord’s heir, the future head of the family, has not a tithe as much of the looks and bearing of the blood as you.”

Louis could not find a word to say in face of such an argument—he looked eagerly yet blankly into the face of the Rector—felt all his pulses throbbing with fiery impatience of the doubt thus cast upon him—yet knew nothing to advance against so subtle and unexpected a charge of kindred, and could only repeat, in a passionate undertone, “I am not Lord Winterbourne’s son.”

“I do not know,” said the Rector, “I have no information which is not common to all the neighbourhood—yet I beg you to guard against delusion. Lord Winterbourne brought you here while you were an infant—since then you have remained at the Hall—he has owned you, I suppose, as much as a man ever owns an illegitimate child. Pardon me, I am obliged to use the common words. Lord Winterbourne is not a man of extended benevolence, neither is he one to take upon himself the responsibility or blame of another. If you are not his son, why did he bring you here?”

Louis raised his face from his hands which had covered it—he was very pale, haggard, almost ghastly. “If you can tell me of any youth—of any child—of any man’s son, whom it was his interest to disgrace and remove out of the way,” said the young man with his parched lips, “I will tell you why I am here.”

The Rector could not quite restrain a start of emotion—not for what the youth said, for that was madness to the man of the world—but for the extreme passion, almost despair, in his face. He thought it best to soothe rather than to excite him.

“I know nothing more than all the world knows,” said Mr Rivers: “but, though I warn you against delusions, I will not say you are wrong when you are so firmly persuaded that you are right. What do you mean to do in London—can I help you there?”

Louis felt with no small pang this giving up of the argument—as if it were useless to discuss anything so visionary—but he roused himself to answer the question: “The first thing I have to do,” he said quickly, “is to maintain my sister and myself.”

The Rector bowed again, very solemnly and gravely—perhaps not without a passing thought that the same duty imposed chains more galling than iron upon himself.

“That done, I will pursue my inquiries as I can,” said Louis: “you think them vain—but time will prove that. I thank you now, for my sister’s sake, for receiving us—and now we must go on our way.”

“Not yet,” said the Rector. “You are without means of course—what, do you think it a disgrace, that you blush for it?—or would you have me suppose that you had taken money from Lord Winterbourne, while you deny that you are his son? For this once suppose me your friend; I will supply you with what you are certain to need; and you can repay me—oh, with double interest if you please!—only do not go to London unprovided—for that is the maddest method of anticipating a heartbreak; your sister is young, almost a child, tender and delicate—let it be, for her sake.”

“Thank you; I will take it as you give it,” said Louis. “I am not so ungenerous as you suppose.”

There was a certain likeness between them, different as they were—there was a likeness in both to these family portraits on the walls. Before such silent witnesses Louis’s passionate disclaimer, sincere though it was, was unbelievable. For no one could believe that he was not an offshoot of the house of Rivers, who looked from his face and the Rector’s to those calm ancient faces on the walls.

CHAPTER VI.—AN ADVENTURER.

“They have left the Hall.”

That was all Marian said when she came to the door to meet her mother and sister, who paused in the porch, overcome with fatigue, haste, and anxiety. Mrs Atheling was obliged to pause and sit down, not caring immediately to see the young culprit who was within.

“And what has happened, Marian,—what has happened? My poor child, did he tell you?” asked Mrs Atheling.

“Nothing has happened, mamma,” said Marian, with a little petulant haste; “only Louis has quarrelled with Lord Winterbourne; but, indeed, I wish you would speak to him. Oh, Agnes, go and talk to Louis; he says he will go to London to-day.”

“And so he should; there is not a moment to be lost,” said Agnes,—“I will go and tell him; we can walk in with him to Oxford, and see him safely away. Tell Hannah to make haste, Marian,—he must not waste an hour.”

“What does she mean,—what is the matter? Oh, what have you heard, mamma?” said Marian, growing very pale.

“Hush, dear; I daresay it was not him,—it was Mr Endicott, who is sure to hate him, poor boy; he said Lord Winterbourne would put him in prison, Marian. Oh,” said Mrs Atheling, getting up hurriedly, “he ought to go at once to Papa.”

But they found Louis, whom they all surrounded immediately with terror, sympathy, and encouragement, entirely unappalled by the threatened vengeance of Lord Winterbourne.

“There is nothing to charge me with; he can bring no accusation against me; if he did ever say it, it must have been a mere piece of bravado,” said Louis; “but it is better I should go at once without losing an hour, as Agnes says. Will you let Rachel stay? and you, who are the kindest mother in the world, when will you have compassion on us and come home?”

“Indeed, I wish we were going now,” said Mrs Atheling; and she said it with genuine feeling, and a sigh of anxiety. “You must tell Papa we will not stay very long; but I suppose we must see about this lawsuit first; and I am sure I cannot tell who is to manage it now, since Charlie is gone.”

“Shall you go to Papa at once, Louis?” asked Marian, who was very anxious to conceal from every one the tears in her downcast eyes.

“Surely, at once,” said Louis. “We are in different circumstances now; I have a great deal to ask any one who knows the family of Rivers. Do you know it never before occurred to me that Lord Winterbourne must have had some powerful inducement for keeping me here, knowing as well as I do that I am not his son.”

Mrs Atheling and Agnes turned a sudden guilty look upon each other; but neither had betrayed the secret;—what did he mean?

“Unless it was his interest in some way—unless it was for his evident advantage to disgrace and disable me,” said Louis, groping in the dark, when they knew one possible solution of the mystery so well, “I am convinced he never would have kept me as he has done at the Hall.”

He spoke in a tone different to that which he had used to the Rector, and very naturally different—for Louis here was triumphant in the faith of his audience, and did not hesitate to say all he felt, nor fear too close an investigation into the grounds of his belief. He spoke fervently; and Marian and Rachel looked at him with the faith of enthusiasm, and Mrs Atheling and Agnes with wonder, agitation, and embarrassment. But, as he went on, it became too much for the self-control of the good mother. She hurried out on pretence of superintending Hannah, and was very soon followed by Agnes. “I durst not stay, I should have told him,” said Mrs Atheling, in a hurried whisper. “Who could put so much into his head, Agnes? who could lead him so near the truth?—only God! My dear child, I believe in it all now.”

Agnes had believed in it all from the first moment of hearing it, but so singular a strain was upon the minds of both mother and daughter, knowing this extraordinary secret which the others did not know, that it was not wonderful they should give a weight much beyond their desert to the queries of Louis. Yet, indeed, Louis’s queries took a wonderfully correct direction, and came very near the truth.

It was a day of extreme agitation to them all, and not until Louis, who had no travelling-bag to pack, had been accompanied once more to the railway, and seen safely away, with many a lingering farewell, was any one able to listen to, or understand, Rachel’s version of the events of last night. When he was quite gone—when it was no longer possible to wave a hand to him in the distance, or even to see the flying white plume of the miraculous horseman who bounded along with all that line of carriages, the three girls came home together through the quiet evening road—the disenchanted road, weary and unlovely, which Marian marvelled much any one could prefer to Bellevue. They walked very close together, with Marian in the midst, comforting her in an implied, sympathetic, girlish fashion—for Rachel, though Louis had belonged to her so very much longer, and was her sole authority, lawgiver, and hero, instinctively kept her own feelings out of sight, and took care of Marian. These girls were very loyal to their own visionary ideas of the mysterious magician who had not come to either of them yet, but whose coming both anticipated some time, with awe and with smiles.

And then Rachel told them how it had fared with her on the previous night. Rachel had very little to say about the Rector; she had given him up conscientiously to Agnes, and with a distant and reverent admiration of his loftiness, contemplated him afar off, too great a person for her friendship. “But in the morning the maid came and took me to Miss Rivers—did you ever see Miss Rivers?—she is very pale—and pretty, though she is old, and a very, very great invalid,” said Rachel. “Some one has to sit up with her every night, and she has so many troubles—headaches, and pains in her side, and coughs, and every sort of thing! She told me all about them as she lay on the sofa in her pretty white dressing-gown, and in such a soft voice as if she was quite used to them, and did not mind. Do you think you could be a nurse to any one who was ill, Agnes?”

“She has been a nurse to all of us when we were ill,” said Marian, rousing herself for the effort, and immediately subsiding into the pensiveness which the sad little beauty would not suffer herself to break, even though she began in secret to be considerably interested about the interior of the mysterious Wood House, and the invisible Miss Rivers. Marian thought Louis would not be pleased if he could imagine her thinking of any one but him, so soon after he had gone away.

“But I don’t mean at home—I mean a stranger,” said Rachel, “one whom you did not love. I think it must be rather hard sometimes; but do you know I was very nearly offering to be nurse to Miss Rivers, she spoke so kindly to me? And then Louis will have to work,” continued the faithful little sister, with tears in her eyes; “you must tell me what I can do, Agnes, not to be a burden upon Louis. Oh, do you think any one would give me money for singing now?”

CHAPTER VII.—LORD WINTERBOURNE.

Lord Winterbourne, all his life, had been a man of guile; he was so long experienced in it, that dissimulation became easy enough to him, when he was not startled or thrown suddenly off his guard. Already every one around him supposed he had quite forgiven and forgotten the wild escapade of Louis. He had no confidant whatever, not even a valet or a steward, and his most intimate associate knew nothing of his dark and secret counsels. When any one mentioned the ungovernable youth who had fled from the Hall, Lord Winterbourne said, “Pooh, pooh—he will soon discover his mistake,” and smiled his pale and sinister smile. Such a face as his could not well look benign; but people were accustomed to his face, and thought it his misfortune—and everybody set him down, as, in this instance at least, of a very forgiving and indulgent spirit, willing that the lad should find out his weakness by experiment, but not at all disposed to inflict any punishment upon his unruly son.

The fact was, however, that Lord Winterbourne was considerably excited and uneasy. He spent hours in a little private library among his papers—carefully went over them, collating and arranging again and again—destroyed some, and filled the private drawers of his cabinet with others. He sent orders to his agent to prosecute with all the energy possible his suit against the Athelings. He had his letters brought to him in his own room, where he was alone, and looked over them with eager haste and something like apprehension. Servants, always sufficiently quick-witted under such circumstances, concluded that my lord expected something, and the expectation descended accordingly through all the grades of the great house; but this did not by any means diminish the number of his guests, or the splendour of his hospitality. New arrivals came constantly to the Hall—and very great people indeed, on their way to Scotland and the moors, looked in upon the disappointed statesman by way of solace. He had made an unspeakable failure in his attempt at statesmanship; but still he had a certain amount of influence, and merited a certain degree of consideration. The quiet country brightened under the shower of noble sportsmen and fair ladies. All Banburyshire crowded to pay its homage. Mrs Edgerley brought her own private menagerie, the newest lion who could be heard of; and herself fell into the wildest fever of architecturalism—fitted up an oratory under the directions of a fellow of Merton—set up an Ecclesiological Society in the darkest of her drawing-rooms—made drawings of “severe saints,” and purchased casts of the finest “examples”—began to embroider an altar-cloth from the designs of one of the most renowned connoisseurs in the ecclesiological city, and talked of nothing but Early English, and Middle Pointed. Politics, literature, and the fine arts, sport, flirtation, and festivity, kept in unusual excitement the whole spectator county of Banbury, and the busy occupants of Winterbourne Hall.

In the midst of all this, the Lord of Winterbourne spent solitary hours in his library among his papers, took solitary rides towards Abingford, moodily courted a meeting with Miss Anastasia, even addressed her when they met, and did all that one unassisted man could do to gain information of her proceedings. He was in a state of restless expectation, not easy to account for. He knew that Louis was in London, but not who had given him the means to go there; and he could find no pretence for bringing back the youth, or asserting authority over him. He waited in well-concealed but frightfully-felt excitement for something, watching with a stealthy but perpetual observation the humble house of the Athelings and the Priory at Abingford. He did not say to himself what it was he apprehended, nor indeed that he apprehended anything; but with that strange certainty which criminals always seem to retain, that fate must come some time, waited in the midst of his gay, busy, frivolous guests, sharing all the occupations round him, like a man in a dream,—waited as the world waits in a pause of deadly silence for the thunderclap. It would rouse him when it came.

It came, but not as he looked for it. Oh blind, vain, guilty soul, with but one honest thought among all its crafts and falsehoods! It came not like the rousing tumult of the thunder, but like an avalanche from the hills; he fell under it with a groan of mortal agony; there was nothing in heaven or earth to defend him from the misery of this sudden blow. All his schemes, all his endeavours, what were they good for now?

FROM PERA TO BUCHAREST.

The map of Europe sufficiently explains why Bucharest, by no means the smallest or least interesting capital in this division of the globe’s surface, is unquestionably the least visited and known. Situate beyond the lands of the Austrian, the Russian, and the Turk, it is remote from every place to which business or pleasure attracts travellers. Distant from frequented highways, the paths to it are long and wearisome. Down the Danube from Vienna, or up it from Constantinople, or across Roumelia and Bulgaria, with rough and savage posting, are the three best but still untempting routes. And in Western Europe, people generally know and care extremely little about Moldavia and Wallachia, provinces concerning which little has been written, save in the ephemeral pages of newspapers. The late war has done something to improve our acquaintance with them; but still there exists concerning them an enormous amount of ignorance, even amongst persons otherwise well informed. It is not long since we met with such persons, who imagined a Hospodar to be sort of savage chief, dressed in sheep’s-skin, and took Boyards to be minor barbarians, inhabiting caves, and living by plunder and the chase. This is far, indeed, from the fact. The Moldo-Wallachians are amongst the greatest ramblers of our time; there are few members of the upper classes who do not quit their own country for some weeks or months every year, and those who have met with them in Vienna and Paris, and in their favourite summer haunts, the baths of France and Germany, will have found them to be usually people of much external polish, of luxurious habits and profuse expenditure, speaking French fluently, and (although often with a bad accent and a deficiency of refinement) almost as their native tongue, and anxious to elevate their race and country in the eyes of foreigners, who, they well know, are little acquainted with and apt to depreciate them. At home they are a good-natured, courteous and hospitable people, to whom a stranger needs but slight introduction to be sure of friendly welcome and attention. And if the introduction be a special one, or the foreigner’s qualities, name or position, recommend him particularly to the notice, and open to him the heart, of the Danubian magnate, he will find himself feasted, caressed, and cherished to an unbounded extent; he will be bidden to repasts savoury of the skill of exotic artists; he will be supplied with horses and escorted to promenades, and made welcome at whatever hour he present himself, and made acquainted with all the pretty women and eligible men in the country—bans, vorniks, logothetes, postelniks, or by whatever other uncouth-sounding titles they may be known. Certainly whoever goes to the Principalities with the idea that he is proceeding to an uncivilised and unpleasant country, will be most agreeably surprised before he has sojourned there three days. The rural districts may not much interest him; the roads, or their absence, may provoke his malediction, and he will not be very loud in praise of the inns; if he enter by way of Galatz, he will doubtless pronounce that flourishing town to be the ugliest and most wearisome place in which ever the convenience or caprice of the Austrian Lloyds’ Steam Company compelled a disgusted traveller to lose forty-eight hours; the small country towns will hardly attract him much, unless it be those which, like Giurgevo, are memorable for actions of war; but the capitals, and especially Bucharest, will offer him pleasures, amusements, and even comforts he did not anticipate when plunging into this frontier land of the Christian and the Turk. The Wallachians have a local proverb to the effect that he who once drinks of the water of the Dumbrovitza, will never drink of any other. The Dumbrovitza is a turbid, narrow, poplar-and-willow-fringed streamlet that flows through Bucharest, valueless for navigation, and having waters of no very pleasant flavour or attractive limpidity; but the metaphor is more transparent than the stream, and intimates the seductions of the gay, idle, insouciant, dissipated, and, if truth must be told, wicked capital of Wallachia.

Even in our luxurious day, wanderers beyond railways, and into regions little trodden, occasionally find ample cause for complaint of miscalled houses of entertainment. The inns about the Lower Danube are rather of a savage sort, and those at Giurgevo and Galatz, especially at the former place, are decidedly bad; a Spanish posada is not exactly the kind of hostelry one would select for a long sojourn; even in comfortable Germany, when one gets off the main tracks, one often finds rough commons and hard quarters in the small towns and village gasthaüser. But I suppose there is no inn in the world, ranking as the first in a capital city, from which a person of ordinary palate, patience, and purse, feels more rejoiced to escape than from the much-trumpeted Hôtel d’Angleterre, at Pera, Constantinople. Doubtless the author of Eothen little thought, when vaunting the activity, resources, and polyglot accomplishments of his travelling attendant, that he was providing future fame and custom for one of the most detestable caravanserais to which, for want of a better, Englishmen ever thronged. Missiri’s hotel, the best in Pera, is one of the worst and dearest in Europe. Small rooms, bad wines, unwholesome dinners of a bastard French description, enormous charges, and gross impertinence, constitute the programme of an establishment which, during the war, was so overwhelmed with custom that it frequently rejected, in one morning, as many guests as would have filled it from cellar to garret. The notion had got abroad that it was the only possible inn in Pera; that at all the others you were poisoned, and plundered, and flea-bitten to an unendurable extent; in short, that it was the correct house of resort. When an idea of this kind takes root amongst Englishmen, argument and proof are alike in vain to eradicate it. The truth is that there were other hotels, very little, if at all worse, than that of Angleterre, and where, if the dining-room was rather smaller, the civility was certainly much greater. But this was not credited; and the English flocked to Missiri’s, until no Englishman who could possibly find room—though it were but a shakedown in a subterranean suite, to which lastcomers were consigned—would go elsewhere, because at Missiri’s alone was he sure to find his acquaintances and countrymen. So that the hotel had literally the pick of the innumerable English passing to and from the Crimea, or abiding for a time in Constantinople. It was in the position of a dealer who finds ten times as many buyers as his stock will supply, and who sells at his own price, delivering his goods with a grumble and a snarl, as if he reproached himself at the last moment with not having been more extortionate. The cool insolence with which this great, crowded, noisy, comfortless tavern rejected every species of complaint, however well founded, bidding malcontents to go farther and fare worse, the unblushing assurance with which the most exorbitant charges were defended and maintained, the grudging surliness with which the merest trifle was conceded when out of the established routine of the house, the impertinent opposition frequently made to the private arrangements of guests, caused one to sigh for the comforts and civility of an English village inn or French provincial hostelry—each fifth-rate in its own country; but oh! how superior in all essentials to the best hotel at Pera!

From this, most joyfully, on a morning early in May, did I turn my steps, followed by two porters bearing my moderate baggage, and descend that precipitous and perilous street which, its surface agreeably varied by loose paving-stones, dead rats, and deep holes, is the most direct route to the Bosphorus. The journey is not fifteen minutes long, but one passes through much variety. The upper part of the street is rather busy. First comes the Russian embassy, then scraping and cleaning preparatory to the reception of a new ambassador. It was used, during the war, as a hospital for French officers. A little lower down are the English postoffice and the French army post; also some French buvettes or wineshops, with inscriptions on their windows and walls, such as one sees at the barriers and in the faubourgs of Paris, announcing the excellence and price of the wine and absinthe vended within. A hotel succeeds to the English post, and just opposite to it are some tottering uninhabited houses, such as there are many of in Pera, uselessly encumbering ground of immense building value, and threatening to fall into the balconies over the way. Below this the street gets narrow, and assumes a solitary and mysterious aspect. Armenian families dwell here; and here, as may be known by the close latticeshutters that defend every opening, are the houses of Mussulmans. No sign of life at door or window, and few passengers in the street. You meet perhaps a porter toiling up with one of those tremendous loads, which Turks alone have the power and knack of bearing; his sinewy brown legs bare, and the sweat raining from his shaggy eyebrows; further on, you come upon a group of British cavalry officers, just across from Scutari, upon luncheon and lounging intent; lower down you overtake a commissariat official in blue uniform, with velvet facings, rosy, and inclined to corpulence, as commissaries should be, and not unfrequently are. He is in command of a small party of soldiers, escorting a string of Turks, laden with specie for the Crimea. Then you are in your turn overtaken by one in staff uniform, mounted on a handsome Arab, too good to be knocked about amongst these abominable pavements and holey places, and followed by an interpreter in cap of red and gold. It is the gallant and popular Major B—— one of Charles James Napier’s Scinde lambs, who reigns supreme over the depot of the Turkish Contingent on the Bosphorus, and is on his way to Stamboul to smoke the pipe of peace and hold converse of grave import with the worthy Seraskier Mehemet Rushdi Pasha—one of the few honest and disinterested statesmen, be it said en passant, of whom Turkey at the present day can boast. And now a short turn to the left and another to the right take us through a series of old-clothes shops, in and outside of which is exhibited the most extraordinary collection of cast-off garments and ancient rags that the eccentric fancy of a crazy painter ever threw together. Houndsditch would stare aghast at the motley museum of toggery, to which all the nations of the earth have contributed. Then we got into Pipe Street; so christened from the occupation of its inhabitants, who are seen sitting in their open shops, which are exactly like wooden boxes with one side taken out, kneading and moulding red clay, and gilding and carving it with much cunning, and fashioning cherry and jasmin sticks, and fitting mouthpieces of glass and amber, and so composing the tchibouk—instrument well beloved by Turks, and well enough suited to a sedate people, sedentary in habits and composed in motions, but ill adapted to Western vivacity and briskness, and a very sorry exchange for the commodious cigar. After passing Pipe Street, one gets into the region of strong scents. We will give a wide berth, if you please, to that butcher’s shop which forms the corner; but, wide though it be, it suffices not, and we are nearly knocked down by the whiff that overtakes us. We pass a block of grimy, tumbledown houses, at whose open windows and doors are seen what we at first take to be a party of boys in gaudy masquerade dresses. They are Armenian women, tawdrily attired, for the most part in jackets and loose trousers, having upon their heads fantastical caps of gaudy embroidered cloth, and in their mouths large paper cigars. This street is known amongst the British, and particularly the maritime portion of the population of Pera, Galata, and Tophaneh, as Kummupjonni Street, a name on whose etymology we are pondering when we are enveloped and assailed by such a diabolical and horrible stench that all reflection and reasoning are at once expelled from our head. It is like passing Death’s laboratory, just as a bottle of Concentrated Essence of Cholera is broken. How anybody can live for a day within a thousand yards of this dreadful exhalation appears miraculous. Yet the neighbourhood is densely peopled, and the author of the perfume, a fabricator of a mess of faded vegetables soaked in fetid vinegar—a preparation much approved and consumed by the Turks—stands in his shop looking healthy and comely, and seemingly unaffected by the miasma he evokes from a sort of sewer into which the superfluous acids and steaming residue of his cauldron flow through a greasy grating. We fly with a shudder, the effluvia pursuing us, and it is hours before the reminiscence entirely leaves our nostrils, chased thence by the fresh breezes of the Euxine.

The Ferdinando Primo, Austrian Lloyds’ steamer, advertised to sail at noon that day, was smoking at her anchorage hard by Seraglio Point when I pushed off from the dilapidated jetty of Tophaneh. As my caïque neared her I saw there was no need for hurry, or chance of her sailing at the appointed time. She was environed, besieged, blockaded, by a flotilla of the miscellaneous craft that swarm in the Golden Horn. Of all places in the world, I believe Constantinople, its harbour and environs, to be that which affords most studies for the painter, whether his taste be for landscape, groups, physiognomy, or buildings, and there were a thousand to be found here in the congregation of boats and miscellany of races that pressed, splashed, rubbed, ground, screamed, scolded, and swore against the sides of the slovenly Austrian craft, whose decks were a chaos of lumber and a hive of humanity. My two athletic and picturesque Greeks, in their red skull-caps, loose shirts, and short trousers of striped muslin, their berry-brown breasts and magnificent legs bare, their splendid mustaches—which a British Guardsman would have thought cheap at a twelvemonth’s pay—twisting out, like the tendrils of a vine, on either side of their classical countenances, drove the nozzle of their slender skiff into a narrow opening in the outer line of boats and lighters, which were five or six deep around the steamer, following up the intrusion by a volley of those colloquial amenities common amongst the boatmen, porters, robbers, beggars, and canaille of Constantinople—that is to say, amongst nine-tenths of the entire population of that most disreputable capital and its suburbs. The Billingsgate of the Bosphorus must be heard and understood for its richness to be appreciated; its furious vehemence makes every stranger wonder that it so rarely leads to blows. In the case of my oarsmen it did not even lead to a passage to the vessel’s gangway. Turkish women, looking like bundles of particoloured rags cast into the bottom of boats, scarcely vouchsafed a glance of their calm serious dark eyes at the noisy intruders; lightermen opposed to us the passive resistance of their heavy-laden barges; three dirty-faced English merchant sailors, extricating themselves from the press, brought their heavy broadbottomed ship’s-boat against the bows of our caïque, making her lose what little vantage she had gained, at which I thought my Greeks would have torn out their mustaches, or committed suicide on the spot, or done some other desperate deed in the excess of their frantic fury. And here, before quitting Constantinople, perhaps, and I hope, for ever (for Stamboul, which in Turkish estimation is but one remove from Paradise, is a most detestable residence to a civilised Christian), I will just destroy a popular delusion, originating, I believe, with Byron, with respect to the convenience and agreeableness of the “light caïque,” that description of boat being about the most uncomfortable I am acquainted with. I do not here refer to fine, roomy, eight-oared caïques, in which you sit on well-cushioned benches and with perfect convenience, six or eight persons if you please, whilst in front of you are your eight or ten rowers, and in rear, on an elevated poop, the helmsman with an umbrella, at sight of which parasol, and of the multitudinous oars, and at the general aspect of the whole, the guards turn out wherever you pass, and arms are presented to you all the way up the Bosphorus, no matter who or what you are, because you might be a pasha, punctilious in matters of etiquette, in which case the soldiers might get the stick for omitting the proper forms. But to keep up a craft of this sort, with its numerous crew, is no slight expense, and is usually done only by ambassadors, by wealthy Turkish functionaries, and by contractors for the supply of the army in the East. Therefore, in speaking of caïques, I refer to the common sort, hired for the trip or day by ordinary people, and having one, two, or three rowers. In these cranky things you sit down on rugs or cushions of questionable purity, your head on a level with the gunwale, your body forming the letter L, since your legs are stretched out before you, and your back kept bolt upright by the perpendicular front of the poop. The only way to be tolerably comfortable in these boats is to sit cross-legged, like a Turk, a posture to which few Europeans ever habituate themselves. In hot weather you lose the breeze, owing to your being so low in the boat, whilst the glare of the sun is terrific; in winter, if there is the least sea on, you are sure to get a ducking, and may not improbably get capsized, for although the boatmen on the Bosphorus are generally skilful, the caïque is unsafe from its extreme sharpness and narrowness, and no year passes without accidents, especially between Constantinople and Scutari.

The arrangements of the Austrian Lloyds, up the Danube from Constantinople to Vienna, are certainly not better than are to be expected from a company enjoying a complete monopoly. Now that the Danube is open, it is to be hoped, for the sake of the public, that an opposition line will be started. This would be a considerable undertaking, and of course the Austrian company would do its utmost to impede and embarrass its competitor’s operations; but still I think that a good line of foreign boats might, by energy and perseverance, overcome all difficulties. The Austrian Lloyds is not in favour with the public, and its present system can please none but the shareholders, who annually divide large profits. Its prices are extremely high, and the accommodation it offers is very indifferent. Now that Paris is less than sixty hours’ railway from Pesth, the route to Constantinople by the Danube ought to be able to compete with that by Marseilles or Trieste. Doubtless many persons, especially of those who fear sea-sickness, would prefer it to Mediterranean and Adriatic buffetings, if in other respects it offered the same advantages as the passage by sea. At present the Danube route is fully thirty per cent dearer than that by Marseilles. It is at best but a long and tedious journey up or down the Danube; and when to its monotony and weariness are added the very worst style of German cuisine (such as prevails on board most of the boats), and a system of sleeping accommodation by which the passengers are ranged on a double row of shelves, in a stifling atmosphere replete with entomological torments, and with one washing-basin for each thirty persons—and this for five or six days together—travellers unused to roughing it will be apt in preference to risk the swell in the Gulf of Lyons, the smart gales that sometimes blow off Sicily’s shores and amongst the isles of Greece, and the heavy gusts not unfrequent in the Sea of Marmora. Then in summer the boats on the Danube do not run often enough. The fast boat (and the slow ones are out of the question for persons going any distance, and serve only for goods and aborigines) runs but once a-week, and is consequently often so overcrowded that people are compelled to sleep on sofas and tables, and even on deck. This I myself have seen. On such occasions the officers of the boat are in the habit of selling their cabins for the voyage at very handsome prices. And the boats are also badly timed. You wait never less than one, generally two, sometimes, I was there assured, three days at Galatz, where the sea-boat from Constantinople leaves you, and the river-boat takes you up. All this surely requires amendment, now that there is so great an increase of intercourse between Eastern and Western Europe. Such amendment would perhaps be made by the Austrians if they once saw their present monopoly as carriers seriously menaced. Austria has long been jealous of maintaining influence in Moldo-Wallachia; and the general opinion in those principalities is that she will do her utmost to filter her way into the country, and gain a permanent footing there by appropriating as many public establishments, such as railroads, banks, and lines of fluvial navigation, as she can get into her hands. The more suspicious see in these projects a hope and design of ultimate annexation; but this must be so remote a prospect, that it is more reasonable to attribute them to the expectation of present profit.

I was informed, on landing at Giurgevo, that a little old gentleman, of imperious air, and with a full white beard, who seemed to be keeping everybody in motion for his own special service, was one of the greatest boyards in Moldavia. This was the first opportunity I had had of observing a boyard on his own dunghill, and I thought I ought to have felt more impressed upon the occasion. I confess I should have taken him for an old Jew, possibly for a dealer in cast-off raiment. I now learned that the beard was the distinguishing mark of the boyard, and of this I had further proof as I proceeded towards Bucharest. That city was the destination of three or four of my fellow-travellers from Galatz, and we at once informed ourselves as to the best means of getting there. A diligence would start immediately, we were told, so we hastily devoured a bad breakfast, and were in readiness to start; not so the diligence, which was shown to us standing near the inn, and looking as unlike a move as if it had merely been placed there to ornament the neighbourhood. Occasionally a Tartar-looking personage, fantastically clothed in sackcloth, emerged from a tumbledown shed, approached the vehicle, gazed at it admiringly, and then again disappeared. After this had been repeated at intervals for about an hour and a half, eight horses, or rather ponies, entangled in a quantity of rope-work, were brought into the yard and attached to the diligence, which was evidently an old German carriage, deemed past work in its own country, but still good enough for the Danubian Principalities; still there were no signs of loading our luggage, but presently appeared a cart, in which we were informed it was to be transported. In most countries, but especially in the East, imprudent is the traveller who suffers himself to be separated from his kit, and we protested accordingly, but in vain. The diligence had its full complement of passengers, and that it should also carry their baggage, and reach Bucharest that night, or without a breakdown, was entirely out of the question; so, after stipulating that the cart should keep up with the diligence, we were fain to submit to the unsatisfactory arrangement.

It is but forty-two miles from Giurgevo to Bucharest, and as we started before eleven o’clock, and were told that we should change horses twice on the road, we thought ourselves justified in believing the assurance given us that we should reach the latter place by five in the afternoon. Our team was not a very promising one. The eight horses, of all sizes, and in most diversified harness, some of the leaders being without bits, were driven by two wildlooking postilions in sheepskin caps, and started off at a good pace. But all sign of a road disappeared almost as soon as we got out of Giurgevo. There was a mere wheel-track across the plain. For some distance our course lay through pastures, where grazing is allowed on payment of about a zwanziger, or eightpence English, per head of cattle, for six months. When we got off the level and upon an undulating surface, our way was through little copses, and the track was frequently so narrow that the oak saplings almost brushed into the carriage as we passed. The road was nowhere very picturesque, but here and there it was pretty enough, and the woods were thickly fringed with wildflowers; not, however, in the profusion that existed when I again travelled along the same track at the beginning of July, when we drove literally through fields of blossom, marigolds, and hollyhocks, and purple flowers growing like lavender, and feathery grey flowers, and beds of pinks. Then, however, I journeyed through the densest clouds of that insidious white dust which is one of the plagues of Bucharest and its environs. Now, a shower the night before had soaked the soil, which is there of a sticky tenacious nature, so entirely without admixture of stones and pebbles that I do not believe you could gather a bushel of these on the whole road from Giurgevo to Bucharest. In winter the ground is so deep that there is almost an end to travelling, except in light carriages with many horses, and the transport of merchandise and produce is nearly suspended; this is owing to the want of roads, of which but very few miles have been made in Wallachia during the whole period of Prince Stirbey’s hospodarship, although large sums have annually been set aside for the purpose. In winter, tracks, passable enough in summer, become quagmires. This was not the case on the day of our journey, but still there was mud enough to retard our progress, and we got on but slowly, looking anxiously out for a relay. At last we ascertained that we should change horses but once, instead of twice or three times, and glad were we when, after crossing a bridge over a shallow stream, we pulled up at a road-side inn. We looked for fresh posters, but none appeared; we were invited to alight, and presently the truth transpired, which was that we were to go right through to Bucharest with the same eight weary garrons, and, to enable them to perform this feat, we were to halt for a time where we now were. This was a nuisance, but grumbling was useless. I was amused, and perfectly astonished, at the plan adopted to invigorate our cattle for their second long stage. After they had devoured a copious feed of corn, they were freed from all harness, and driven like so many oxen into the river. After unlimited drink and much splashing and soaking, a mounted man rode into the river on the other side, and drove them out, and they came scampering, capering and kicking up to the diligence, and submitted themselves to be rubbed down and harnessed with the usual docility of Moldo-Wallachian horses.

It was a Sunday, a hot and beautiful day, and the inhabitants of the straggling village were making the most of the holiday. The inn, a mere road-side winehouse and baiting place, which a few weeks later was sacked and partly destroyed by a detachment of Austrian soldiers that was marching through, was full of peasants eating and drinking. The sound of music and festivity, a short distance off, attracted us, and we soon came upon a wedding-party, dancing and making merry outside the dwelling of the bride’s family. The dance that seemed most in favour was neither graceful nor diversified in its figures; the dancers formed a circle, holding hands, and alternately closed in and spread out, increasing or diminishing the circumference. This seemed the whole of the dance, which, however, was nearly broken up by such an event as the approach of four or five strangers, one of them an officer in uniform, and another having a rather luxuriant beard, which immediately caused him to be taken for a boyard of the first feather. The women seemed bashful—they were certainly shy and not pretty, and it struck me that some of them would have been the better for soap and water. Their dress, which was that common amongst their class in Wallachia, consisted of a shirt, fastened round the neck and completely covering the upper part of their persons. From the waist downwards they were dressed like the women of nearly all countries—that is to say, they wore a lot of petticoats—but, above the waist, the chemise was their only covering. This costume has rather a striking effect, until one gets used to it. To very well made women, who do not require the support of the corset—and many such are to be found amongst the Wallachian peasantry—it is far from unbecoming, since it displays the contour and graces of the form far better than any artificial tightening; but in the case of women past a certain age, and who have been addicted to child-bearing, stays are missed, and the coup d’œil is by no means satisfactory. The shirt is sometimes of a material which, without being indecently transparent, allows a slight flesh tint to transpire; but these shirts are usually thickly sprinkled with stars or other devices worked in gold or silver, and this is, I believe, considered the strict national costume. The usual ornaments of the women of the lower classes are gold and silver coins, and even the mixed metal piastres. They are pierced and strung, and worn as necklaces, and also in the form of a sort of cap or broad circlet over the hair. In full dress, a Wallachian peasant girl thus usually carries her dowry on her person. The temptation of these rosaries of ducats and dollars sometimes proved too strong for the virtue of the Austrian occupants of the Principalities, and many stories did I hear, too many of them well authenticated, of poor girls being stripped of their little fortune by the rude hand of a brutal Kaiserlich. To judge from the quantity of coin, chiefly Turkish and Austrian, displayed, by the ladies of the wedding-party, they were rather well-to-do people of their class. The bride wore several of the large gold Turkish coins, as big as Spanish ounces, to say nothing of a quantity of smaller money. She was brought up to be shown to us, quite as a matter of course, and kissed the hand of our bearded companion, who, admonished by some little murmur of Backshish! that reached his ears, had to requite the compliment in specie. Backshish is quite as much in favour in the Christian provinces on the Danube as in any other part of Turkey. I must say that, even if the bride’s kiss had been on his lips instead of his hand, it would hardly have been worth the money, for she was an ordinary-looking damsel, much surpassed in beauty by many of her bridesmaids and companions. Doubtless she was lovely in the eyes of the bridegroom, a sheepish but good-tempered-looking young fellow, who seemed immensely gratified by the honour of our visit, and especially by the condescension of the pseudo-boyard. We were given to drink, and for aught I know, so rapidly did our popularity increase, we should have been invited to supper, had not much whip-cracking, and jingling, and shouting, warned us that our carriage was ready and our time up. Our horses had had an hour and a half’s rest, thanks to which they managed to perform the rest of the journey, and brought us, soon after eight of the clock, to the barrier of Bucharest the well-beloved.

The undulating nature of the ground on which Bucharest is built renders it difficult to obtain from any point of the environs a full view of the city. One of the best I have seen is a lithograph published at Vienna, taken from the river bank, and having the metropolitan church, which stands on an eminence, in the centre of the picture. After passing the barrier, one proceeds for a considerable distance over open ground, diversified with gardens, but sparingly sprinkled with houses, and giving little the idea of a town. Indeed, except in the very heart of the place, in the great principal street, the Mogosöe, in the Leipsick street and a few other shop streets, the Wallachian capital has much more the look of a large straggling village than of a city. It seems as if pains had been taken to avoid the compactness which, as economising distances, is generally held desirable in a large town. It is full of gardens and enclosures, and of open spaces of waste ground. Every house of any size and pretensions has a garden, and usually a large one. The effect produced is very rural and pleasing; the masses of brick and mortar are few, foliage and flowers are everywhere. Earthquakes being of no unfrequent occurrence here (although some years have elapsed since one occurred sufficiently violent to do much damage), few houses are built more than one story high. Thus it is easy to understand that Bucharest, with a population of 100,000, or according to the highest estimate 120,000 souls, includes within its barriers an area said to be equal to two-thirds of that of Paris. Were it a commercial place, the distances would be extremely inconvenient; as it is, and for the mere purposes of social intercourse, the inhabitants spend a very large portion of their time in carriages, the more so as it can hardly be said that there is any particular quarter prescribed by fashion as the residence of the upper classes, who are scattered in very opposite directions. If it be true, as Sam Slick says, that the way to estimate a capital is by its private carriages, Bucharest should rank pretty high, for there, more than anywhere else, is a carriage almost a necessary of life; and as the expense of keeping it is not great, forage being abundant and horses cheap, most families in easy circumstances have at least two vehicles—one for the husband, the other for the wife. When there is only one the lady generally takes it, and the husband contents himself with a hired birja—a light calèche, drawn by two horses, which you engage by the day or hour. In most places this mode of engagement would imply a very moderate rate of speed; but the birja-drivers, most of whom are Russians, spurred by the hopes of a backshish, go at an astonishing rate, and a foreigner is more apt—until he becomes aware of their skill in driving and of the unfrequency of accidents—to check their speed than to urge them to increased haste over the broken pavement and many holes and round the sharp corners of the streets of Bucharest.

One sees few old buildings in Bucharest, the last bad earthquake having upset nearly all the lofty and ancient fabrics. There are many large handsome houses, but the style of building is generally plain. The eye with difficulty gets accustomed to the strange contrasts met with at every step. Hard by spacious mansions, the residence of wealthy boyards, one almost literally stumbles over low Bulgarian huts, constructed half above and half under the ground. There are generally large courts in front of the better class of houses, and down one side of them frequently extends a range of low mean buildings, used as stables and offices, which shock the eye by their juxtaposition to the principal and handsome edifice. The streets are of extraordinary irregularity, and a stranger is long in learning his way about the town; the more so as he rarely walks, the mud in winter, and the dust, heat, and distances in summer, putting that mode of locomotion nearly out of the question. The badness of the pavement, and its total absence from a great portion of the streets, is accounted for by the size of the town, which would require an enormous paving rate to be levied on its comparatively scanty population. Moreover, in Wallachia, and especially under its recent ruler, money levied for useful public objects has but too often been diverted from its original destination, and scandalously misapplied, sometimes to purposes of political corruption. And even where public works have been executed, it has been at an exaggerated cost, explicable only by a system of robbery unparalleled elsewhere than in the East. Thus the very handsome opera-house, quite worthy of a first-rate European capital, filled the pockets of architects and contractors, and government officials, and might have been erected three or four times over for the sums that were embezzled and swallowed up in its construction. The exhospodar Stirbey, in the sort of justification he has recently published, boasts of this theatre as one of the benefits conferred on Bucharest during his reign. As far as the fact of its erection goes, there it stands, to speak for itself, an extremely handsome house, luxuriously fitted up, with lobbies, staircases, and saloons on a magnificent scale, and whose only fault is that, in their anxiety for an imposing effect, the designers have made the boxes so lofty that it never looks well filled. But touching the cost, Prince Stirbey is mute, although it is well known in Wallachia how monstrous it was, and how large a portion of it was absorbed by the most barefaced peculation.

It is not only as regards the buildings composing it, but in a thousand other respects, that Bucharest is par excellence the city of contrasts. Some of the most striking of these are vividly summed up in a few lines by the late French Consul-general at Bucharest, M. Poujade, in one of his interesting contributions to the Revue des Deux Mondes.[5] “One sees,” he says, “palaces, or at least handsome hotels, and frightful hovels; carriages from the workshops of Binder or Clochez, drawn by coachmen in sumptuous livery, and enormous Transylvanian carts, enclosing a population like that of Noah’s Ark, and drawn by eight, ten, twenty horses or mares, with their colts playing around them at full liberty; fiery high-bred Russian and Hungarian horses, and huge red-eyed buffaloes; elegant men and women dressed according to the latest Parisian fashion, and peasants in much the same costume as the Dacians wore two thousand years ago; dirty Albanians perambulating the streets selling braga (a fermented drink), and shops in which are displayed the bonbons of Boissier, and the gastronomical delicacies of Potel and Chabot; monks smoking their pipes at the winehouse, and on the tombs, in the cemeteries that exist in the very heart of the town, side-by-side with gypsies, and with itinerant musicians (laoutari) dressed in long flowing cloaks, the violin, mandoline, or pandean-pipes suspended to their girdle, ready to sell their services at a baptism, a marriage, or a burial. Oriental life, which is departing, and European life, which replaces it, are here associated, and succeed each other as in a panorama.” This is a very well dashed-off glimpse of Bucharest, with true and lifelike tints, like one of Preziosi’s capital aquarelles of Constantinople streets. Such contrasts and details might be multiplied almost infinitely; for the physiognomy of Bucharest has a thousand different faces, both by day and by night. The gypsies alluded to by M. Poujade are a singular feature of the sketch, tawny wild figures dwelling by preference like ghouls in the graveyards, housing themselves also under ragged canvass on those desert plots of ground which abound in Bucharest, or taking up temporary quarters in the shells of unfinished houses. A stranger, unacquainted with their dialect, can gain but little insight into their usages and customs. Borrow should go amongst them; he would find a rich field for observation. They work, many of them, as bricklayers; the women hang about, tawny dishevelled creatures, with infants tugging at their yellow breasts. The children, when a little older, are almost like the young of animals. You are driving down the busiest street of Bucharest on a sultry summer noon. You have just passed an elegant carriage with a pair of spanking bays; a most correct coachman on the box; a strapping chasseur, bearded, befeathered, and sword-bearing, in the rumble; within, a couple of princesses (the Wallachians freely translate their native titles into the highest current in Western Europe) attired in the last fashions from Longchamps: the whole turn-out would be perfectly in place in Hyde Park or the Bois de Boulogne. From the door of a shop full of cravats, perfumery, and other “nouveautés de Paris,” the mere sight of which transports you to Regent Street or the Boulevards, a couple of dandies with well-waxed mustaches have just waved to you a yellow-kid salutation. Twenty paces further, in a shallow recess of the street, you come to a bronze pump, under and around which are collected a group of gypsy urchins, nearly of the same colour as the metal, with thin legs, prominent abdomens, and monkey features, and all as naked as they were born. It is hard to believe that any more exact link than this will ever be found between man and the baboon. The creatures are in a state of perfect animal enjoyment. The thermometer is at 100° in the shade at the very least, and they are rushing in and out of the gush of bright cold water from the fountain, their dingy bodies sparkling in the sun, their monkey features grinning like chimney-piece ornaments. Their bath over, they will run naked through the streets to where their mothers’ kettle boils, and lie down to sleep in the dust, in the shadow of a tombstone. One is tempted to think that, in that climate, a cool pump, a shady nook, and the absence of raiment, constitute the perfection of human happiness.

I believe that every foreigner who visits Bucharest in the fine season carries away with him a most agreeable impression of the place. In winter, when the snow lies deep, and the streets are sloughs, and the wolves prowl hungrily in the fields around the town, and occasionally risk themselves in the suburbs and carry off a stray child, the attraction may be less, even though that is the gay season, when balls and suppers abound, and masquerades occur almost every night. But in early summer, before the scorching sun has embrowned the foliage and driven away the wealthier of the inhabitants, nothing can be more agreeable than this rural city, belted with pleasant meadows and promenades, and nestling in a net-work of gardens and a bower of vines. During my two months’ stay I saw many English and French pass through, chiefly officers from the Crimea or Constantinople, who chose that route home; and all seemed delighted with their visit, and appeared to depart with regret. Bucharest is a city of idleness, and life there is arranged so as to while away as agreeably as possible the superabundant leisure. The usual dinner-hour is three or four o’clock, and after that meal many persons go to take ice or a stroll in a large and delightful public garden in the centre of the town—also a benefit bequeathed to Bucharest by Prince Stirbey’s administration, at the cost of the unrequited labour of thousands of unfortunate serfs. The best society, however, frequents this garden but little, or remains there but a short time, proceeding, about seven o’clock, to the agreeable drive known as the Chaussée, a road out of the town which is a continuation of the main street, with plantation and a garden on either side, and further on, an avenue of trees separating it from luxuriant pastures. It is here that an idea is best formed of the luxury and wealth of Bucharest, whither, in fact, nearly all the rich people of the province repair to spend their money. On the Chaussée assemble the fashionables of the Wallachian capital, a few of the men mounted on fine horses, but most of them, and all the ladies, in elegant carriages of Vienna and Paris build. This, of a summer evening, is the focus of flirtation, and the source and centre of not a little scandal. After a few turns up and down, at as rapid a pace as the throng of vehicles will permit, the ladies generally draw up by the side of the footpath, and either alight and walk, or receive visits in their open carriages. Amongst the crowd of dashing equipages were conspicuous, this last summer, those of the hospodar, known from afar by the scarlet liveries of the servants, and those of the foreign diplomatic agents, most of them with chasseurs or richly attired Albanians. The numerous Austrian uniforms added to the animation of the scene, some of the young staff-officers driving handsome curricles and tilburies, whilst the crowd was completed by the humble but ubiquitous birja. As the daylight waned, the crowd diminished, although, in the fine summer evenings, not a few promenaders remained till after dark, strolling amongst the trees, or seated in the carriages, enjoying the pleasant coolness; and here and there vacant vehicles, whose absent owners were well known, afforded pretext of malicious comment to lingering scandal-mongers. Towards nine o’clock, the Chaussée was generally nearly deserted, and, on driving into town, many of the carriages might be seen drawn up at the door of the Tortoni of Bucharest, from which excellent ices and refreshments were brought out to the fair occupants. A few, braving the heat, would thence proceed to the theatre, where a French company had replaced the Italians; whilst the men betook themselves to the Rouman Circle, a newly established club, or proceeded to join parties of a few friends, a sort of Spanish conversational tertulia, which replace, when the season of gaiety is over, assemblies of a more numerous and pretentious description.

Night in Bucharest is not without peculiarities which forcibly strike the stranger. For those persons who insist upon pedestrian exercise, it is the best time for a stroll, for although the heat often but partially departs with daylight, the dust is less, and moreover at evening, the Chaussée, the avenues to it, and some of the principal streets, as well as those leading to the Tchismedjiou or public garden, are watered in a sort of primitive way, by men with carts who draw off the water into churn-shaped tubs and dash it over the thirsty soil and heated pavements. Of a clear warm night, when the streets and gardens are bathed in the bright silver light of a Wallachian moon, the people of Bucharest may be said to live in the open air. Every window is open, and they stand outside their houses or gossiping at the doors. They are an early-rising population, and by eleven the streets are nearly deserted and stillness reigns. One very curious practice which prevails is that of sleeping in the streets. Walking along between ten and eleven one warm dark evening (gas is unknown in Bucharest, and oil lamps are dim, few, and far between) I suddenly found myself trampling upon cushions. On investigation, the soft substance proved to be a mattress. Fortunately no one was as yet sleeping on it. It occupied the whole width of the narrow pavement, and I stepped off into the carriageway. Just then a man issued from an open door, with a coverlet on his arm; he was making his bed. Several other beds were arranged in succession close to the walls of the houses; it was an al fresco dormitory. Doubtless in a hot climate the plan has its advantages, securing fresh air and avoiding troublesome domestic insects. The risk of being trampled upon is small in a city where scarcely a soul is seen in the streets after midnight. I was informed, just as I was leaving Bucharest, that these out-of-door slumberers are chiefly Jews, there very numerous, and that they have a summer festival which lasts about a fortnight and commemorates the passage of the desert by the children of Israel, during which they do not sleep under a roof, and that a tradition exists amongst them that a child conceived during that period will be the Messiah. This tale was told me by Christians, and I by no means vouch for its correctness, but it is curious, and I was afterwards sorry I had not had time to ascertain positively, by inquiry of the Wallachian Hebrews, whether such a custom and belief really exist amongst them.

Many of the street-sleepers have a small dog beside their couch, which rushes out, barking furiously, if one inadvertently steps too near its master’s couch. The precaution must, one would think, be as destructive of slumber as it may be useful against marauders, the more so as the bark of the vigilant sentry is usually echoed by that of numerous vagrant curs of all breeds and sizes which at night infest the streets of Bucharest, and frequently molest the pedestrian. It is very difficult to throw stones at these animals, for there are none to be had, as the benighted and exasperated stranger frequently finds when, returning late to his lodging, he is beset by dogs of every description, from the diminutive yelping terrier to animals of a really formidable size and deep-mouthed aggressive bark, and stoops to seek a missile. These wild ownerless dogs, formerly so numerous and even dangerous in Constantinople, but now greatly thinned and wholly daunted there by the deadly blows and rough usage they have received at the hands of French soldiers and British mariners, are still plentiful at Bucharest, where, however, they can hardly be considered dangerous; at least I never heard of their devouring a human being in the latter place, as they have occasionally been known to do in the Turkish capital—especially when the said being had thought proper to take an overpowering quantity of strong drink and to lie down in the gutter to sleep it off; but still they are numerous, bold, and noisy enough to alarm a timid person, and one sometimes hears the affrighted scream of a belated child or woman beset by these persevering plagues. They are more troublesome than bloodthirsty; but, although the noise they make is a most sleep-destroying nuisance, nobody seems to think of taking measures to expel them, even from his own premises. At the hotel where I lived, half-a-dozen of them had taken up their quarters in the large courtyard round which the house was built. Some of them were supposed, I believe, to belong to hostlers or hangers-on about the establishment; but I could not find out that their putative owners took any charge of them, and certainly they did not prevent them from raising the most diabolical din at hours when the inmates of the hotel might be supposed buried in sleep, or at least courting it. The gates of the yard were often left open; street-walking dogs would sneak in, predatorily minded and lured by the rank odours of the Wallachian kitchen, and desperate conflicts were the frequent result, the said canine encounters being attended with an amount of barking, snarling, howling, and yelling, enough to waken the dead. I do not believe it woke the Bucharestians, although the complaints of the sleepless strangers staying in the house were loud and frequent.

Beside the dogs, the most lively and noisy creature in the streets of Bucharest of a night is the watchman or chinny-accolo, a compound word which I write as pronounced, and possibly with much offence against correct orthography. The newcomer to the Wallachian capital, returning home late, is startled by the sudden apparition of a dilapidated figure which emerges from a dark nook or crazy sentry-box, strikes a heavy staff upon the pavement and hoarsely shouts chinnyaccoloooo! the last syllable being drawn out ad libitum, and relinquished as if with regret. Then the figure usually repeats the chinny, with a short exasperated stress on the first syllable, as if he were angry with or insisting upon something. The foreigner has a vague idea that this discordant and unintelligible cry is of the nature of a Qui vive? or Who goes there?—as in fact it is—but, observing that the vociferator has no firearms, and consequently cannot requite silence with a shot, and being moreover in total ignorance how he should reply, he usually walks quietly on; and the guardian of the night, perceiving that he is not a member of the dangerous classes, retreats into his nook and suffers him to pass without further question. The Moldo-Wallachians are an inoffensive and honest race—even now, that they have been to a certain extent demoralised by foreign military occupations—crime is not frequent amongst them, and the chinnyaccolos have little to do. Now and then they make a charge upon an unusually noisy troop of dogs, but their principal employment seems to be that of covering up the sleepers upon the pavement, when restless slumbers, the result perhaps of an unquiet conscience or a heavy supper, may cause them to toss their blankets abroad.

As, if I remember rightly, Murray’s Hand-book for Turkey, by no means the best of his collection, is extremely brief and unsatisfactory in its notice of Bucharest, I may perhaps be rendering a service to persons whom this imperfect sketch of its attractions may induce to pay a summer visit to that pleasant city, if I devote a few lines to the subject of hotels. In the first place, it is to be observed that furnished lodgings are not to be had in Bucharest,—at least they were unobtainable in the spring and summer of 1856; but that was perhaps owing to the number of Austrian officers who were billeted upon the houses of the inhabitants. Unless, therefore, you had a friend to give you quarters, you had no resource but to stop at an hotel. The best of these is the Hôtel de Londres, a large house built expressly for an inn, and where one finds good and lofty apartments, clean and tolerably well-furnished, at high prices; but Bucharest, especially since the war, is by no means a cheap place. The hotel is of enormous size, and full of long galleries and spacious landing-places. The rooms are without bells, and the mode of summoning the servants is original and inconvenient. On each landing-place is a bell-rope, below which is a dial-plate, having around it the numbers of the neighbouring rooms. When you require anything you have to issue forth from your apartment, ring this bell, once for waiter, twice for boots, thrice for chambermaid, and turn the needle of the dial to the number of your room. But it frequently happens that before the servant answers your call, somebody else gives a pull at the rope, and shifts the needle to his number; so that you soon find that the only way of getting attended to is, after ringing, to lie in wait at your door, and, on the appearance of the slave, to rush out, collar him drag him into your room, and release him only upon his solemn promise to do what you require before he even looks at the dial. This is not a comfortable state of things; but bell-hangers are scarce in Wallachia, and domestics generally bad. Even in the better class of private houses, good attendance is secured only by keeping what in England would be considered an unreasonable number of servants for the requirements of the family. The Wallachian domestics are lazy, and imported foreigners soon rival them in this respect. I tried the experiment of hiring one of the latter sort, but found he would do nothing but sleep in the porter’s lodge, and, when compelled to work, took sick immediately; so I was compelled to get rid of him, and to revert to the system of lying in ambush for waiters. Upon the whole, however, one may be worse put up than at the Hôtel de Londres, where there is great civility, and a desire to oblige; but hotel-keeping is a science that has still much progress to make in the cities of Moldavia and Wallachia. I cannot say much for the cooking; and the Hôtel de France, in the Mogosöe Street, is in that respect considered superior, and passes for a first-rate French restaurant, although in Vienna or Paris it would be set down as a gargote, and indeed a good dinner is to be obtained there only by ordering it beforehand, and paying rather more than you would for a sumptuous banquet at the Trois Frères.

Early in the month of June, in a cloud of dust and a blaze of heat, commenced and concluded the annual mosh or fair of Bucharest. The articles exposed for sale were not calculated to give an exalted idea of the manufacturing progress of the province, whose best reliance for prosperity is evidently upon its agricultural produce. The staple commodities were wicker-baskets, of a wearisome monotony of form, pots of red earth, not even glazed, and the rough-hewn, churn-shaped buckets here universally used, in houses, baths, for street-watering, &c. Anything more primitive than these various articles cannot be imagined; they are just what one might expect to find amongst a newly-discovered tribe of Indians, which, lurking in a remote corner of the backwoods, had avoided all intercourse with the pale-faces. Any idea of ornament seems utterly alien to the minds of the peasants who manufacture these useful but uncouth objects, which are brought to town in carts as antediluvian as themselves,—clumsy, heavy vehicles, roofed in with boughs. The only other things I could discover in the fair which were manifestly native productions (the toys and trumpets smelt of Germany), were rings of coarse, coloured glass, to thrust over the hand and wear as bracelets, much the sort of thing one might look for upon the ebon arm of the Queen of the Cannibal Islands, or dangling from the obtuse snout of some central-African slave-dealing sovereign. There were also chimney-piece ornaments formed of clay, and representing zoological monsters, of which traditions may possibly have been handed down from the days of the Dacians. Shows there were, too: a camel ridden by a monkey, and a gentleman who sat upon the topmost of a pyramid of bottles, and balanced plates upon his nose and chin; and, in the corner of a tent, the emanations from which were far from fragrant, Punch, the ubiquitous, set up his house, attracted a delighted audience, and went through the celebrated drama of his serio-comic existence, slightly varied from the English version, but including even a larger amount of domestic dissension, violent deaths, and desperate struggles with the enemy of mankind; the whole winding up with the appearance of a monstrous head—a cross, apparently, between a Skye terrier and a snapping turtle—which caught the reprobate Polichinello by the nose, and dragged him screaming into the showman’s box. The streets of the fair were formed of huts of branches, some of them neatly enough made, and comprising two rooms, but which quickly lost their fresh verdant aspect, the foliage becoming embrowned by the sun, and coated with dust. Inside these wigwams a promiscuous throng ate, drank, cooked their food, danced, slept, suckled babies, played upon rude musical instruments, and contrived to exist in an atmosphere and amongst odours that might have stifled an habitual inhabitant of a slaver’s hold, or a daily passenger through the richest streams of Galata. The mere smell of the sausages dropping their unctuous superabundance into the wood-fires over which they grizzled, was a week’s dinners to a hungry man. Except in the evening, when the beau monde, deserting the Chaussée, drives to the fair, the attendance is almost exclusively of the lower orders,—peasants in their round sheepskin caps and antique costume, which has scarcely varied since Trajan’s day, many of them stalwart, fine-looking men, with features telling of their Italian origin; women in more various attire, not generally very becoming, although one head-dress, consisting of a thin white shawl gathered over the head, with the ends drooping behind, is not ungraceful. The most original and characteristic female dress there worn was the one I have already described,—the shirt, often of a fine and transparent texture, sprinkled with stars or sprigs worked in gold or silver, whilst round the waist are fastened petticoats and a variety of coloured aprons, worn both before and behind. Besides the peasantry, Wallachian soldiers in their ugly uniforms, nursemaids with children, and a few white-coated Austrians, made up the morning attendance at the fair. On the last day the fun terminated with an evening entertainment annually given by the Aga or prefect of police, in a space enclosed with hedges and flags, and lighted with coloured lamps, where music played, and people walked about and ate ices under tents, and where the hospodar came, with gorgeous liveries and a numerous escort, to admire his own portrait hung up in a marquee, and where the aga himself narrowly escaped apoplexy from the violence of his exertions and effervescence of his hospitality; and people who had no tickets jockeyed the sentries, leapt the ditches, and got in through gaps in the hedges, until at last (this being essentially a popular festival) every one was admitted who chose to walk in; and ragged boys and Wallachian “roughs” were seen elbowing boyards of fabulous lineage, and making disorderly and destructive onslaughts upon trays of sweetmeats; and, finally, everybody got extremely dusty and tired, and began to wish he had not come, and to long to escape; and there was a general rush for everybody’s carriage, which nobody could find, and people betook themselves to bed, and the mosh was at an end in Bucharest for that year.

At the period of my arrival in the Principalities, the Moldo-Wallachians were in a fever of impatience to get rid of the Austrian occupation, to them most odious. The war was over, and they could not understand why a foreign army should still be imposed upon them, occasioning them great expense and still greater annoyance. Absorbed by domestic considerations, they did not appreciate or even discern those important European ones which induced the Allies to maintain an Austrian force on the Russian frontier until the terms of the Treaty of Paris should be carried out. Much as they themselves have suffered from Muscovite bad faith and encroachment, their exasperation at the prolonged presence of their detested military guests blinded them to the probability that Russia might seek to evade the conditions she had agreed to. It must be owned that the conduct of the Austrian army of occupation had been such as to explain the furious eagerness of the Moldo-Wallachians for its departure. Its bearing had certainly not been that becoming friends and allies in peaceable provinces inhabited by an extremely docile and quiet race. Had the imperial legions conquered the country after fierce opposition, and found themselves surrounded by scowling foes, whose hatred was to be kept from dangerous manifestation by fear alone, their conduct might have been comprehensible. But when they arrived there was no particular ill-feeling towards them, and they had only themselves to thank for the bitter one which afterwards arose. The general order by which, at the end of last May, the Emperor of Austria congratulated his army in Moldo-Wallachia on its military spirit and endurance of privations, excited the laughter of all who were aware of the real circumstances of the case. There was little to endure for troops whose requirements and exactions were so great as to constitute a most onerous burthen on the people; and it is but a poor military spirit that is testified by cruel ill-treatment of unoffending civilians. At the very time that the order appeared, no one could pass a few weeks in the Principalities without becoming convinced, by personal observation, that the general tone and demeanour of the Austrian soldiery in their intercourse with the people were overbearing and aggravating, and that the least show of opposition led to brutality and violence. The people of those provinces are neither dogged nor disobliging; a word, if they understand it, generally suffices to procure obedience where it is due; but they are not particularly quick of comprehension, and, on the other hand, the Austrians were prone to exact more than they were entitled to, and to enforce, by blows, unreasonable demands or illunderstood orders. If the behaviour of the officers was better, although this was by no means invariably the case, few of them took pains to restrain their men, but looked on with indifference and without interference. Of this I could cite many examples which came under my own notice, and others vouched for by indisputable testimony. On one of the first days of June, an old white-haired Wallachian peasant was driving a cart through one of the most frequented streets of Bucharest, when he somehow got in the way of an Austrian soldier similarly engaged. He was immediately assailed in the fiercest manner, thrown to the ground, and violently beaten. A German shopkeeper, standing at his door, witnessed this cruelty and appealed to an officer who was passing, entreating him to check it. “Das geht mich nicht an”—it is no business of mine—was the cool reply, and the soldier was left to satiate his fury. As for the bystanders interfering, none would think of doing so, for the Austrians invariably carry their side-arms, and instances are abundant of their promptitude in using them against unarmed and defenceless persons. The Turkish soldiers in the provinces used not to carry their bayonets and sabres when off duty, but just before the return of Stirbey from Vienna to Bucharest, and within a month afterwards, no less than sixty-nine of them were wounded by Austrians, and it was found necessary to authorise them to wear their side-arms. Last summer, a well-known English officer, who holds high rank in the Turkish service, was riding in the suburbs of Bucharest, in a sort of half uniform, but without arms, when he overtook an Austrian soldier, carrying his musket sloped over his shoulder and protruding far behind him. As he passed, the man made a sudden movement of his body, which caused the musket to swing round and strike the officer a violent blow. This was doubtless unintentional, but the blow was so sharp that the officer involuntarily apostrophised the man in English, forgetting that he would not understand him, and asked him what he meant. Instead of apologising, the soldier looked steadily at him and fixed his bayonet. There was nothing for it but to ride on, and complaint to the fellow’s superiors would have been of little avail. About this same time there occurred, at the Wallachian town of Busco, an outrage in which three civilians were wounded, and whose circumstances were rather curious. An Austrian soldier drank in a wine-shop, and, notwithstanding the host’s opposition, left it without paying and ran off. He was pursued, and, being somewhat intoxicated, he ran into a mill-stream, where he would have been drowned but for the exertions of his pursuers. Other soldiers came up, and the rescuers were sabred; because, argued these military sophists, if their comrade had not been pursued he would not have run, and consequently would not have fallen into the water and nearly lost his life.

I had scarcely set foot in Moldavia when, at Galatz, numerous instances of Austrian misconduct were related to me, my informants being some of the principal local authorities, and their statements being corroborated by a foreign consul, who was by no means ill-disposed to the Austrians, and indeed took a more favourable view of their general conduct than almost any other person I met with in the Principalities. But regard to truth compelled him to admit that of the incidents in question. A battalion had arrived two days before, to take its quarters in the town, and on such occasions there were invariably complaints to the civil authorities from persons who had been wounded or beaten by the soldiers. It was no uncommon practice with them to accept money in lieu of lodging from the persons on whom they were billeted, and then to go and insist violently on admission into quarters to which they had no claim. Instances were cited of gross misconduct on the part of officers. On two different occasions these gentlemen, having had billets assigned them in two of the best houses in the place, refused to accept the comfortable rooms allotted to them, and insisted on occupying the apartment of the lady of the house. Compliance being refused with the caprice of one of them, he forgot himself so far as to draw his sword, and finding the door of the room he coveted locked, he endeavoured to kick it open. The mistress of the house, the Countess P—, behaved with great spirit. “Put up your sword, sir,” she said; “your Emperor did not give it you to be thus used.” It was very rare that the least redress could be obtained for such insults and outrages, any more than for the many grave offences against person and property, the robberies and murders, that were clearly brought home to Austrian soldiers. In Wallachia especially, the perpetrators of such crimes were certain of impunity; for Prince Stirbey, long devoted to Russia, had become the tool of Austria, by whose influence he hoped to be maintained in power after his term of office should have expired. Had he done his duty as ruler of the Principality, he would have made such forcible representations as must assuredly have led to a diminution of the evil. Instead of this, with him whatever the Austrians did was well done, and the strongest proofs of their excesses, frequently laid before him, were by him smothered and suppressed. This was notably the case with respect to a disgraceful affair that occurred on the 31st May at Buseo, a town on the road from Bucharest to the Wallachian frontier. A body of Austrian lancers, marching through, required carts for their baggage. Some slight delay occurred in providing them, and this being reported to the officer commanding, he is said to have replied: “You have got arms; take carts.” Thus licensed, the Austrians seized some carts which were just leaving the town, laden with the baggage and military-chest of a Wallachian regiment; the slender baggage-guard, although it made little show of resistance, was mercilessly sabred, and some civilians and soldiers without arms were also cut down. The prefect of the town was beaten and ill-treated, and the officer commanding the Wallachians, who reached the place after the affray was over, was charged and ridden down by the playful Austrians. Prince Stirbey’s body-surgeon, sent over specially to look to the wounded, reported, with the counter-signature of an Austrian surgeon, that there were twenty Wallachians wounded, some very dangerously. Amongst the twenty men there were upwards of a hundred and twenty wounds; showing the deliberate cruelty and ferocity of the Austrians, for not one-third of the wounded were armed when they were thus barbarously assailed. The report of the medical men was seen by various persons in Bucharest; the indignation was general, and was shared and vehemently expressed even by some of the hospodar’s own household and clique; it was thought impossible that so shameful a massacre should be overlooked; nevertheless, no steps were taken to obtain the punishment of the guilty. The first remark of the officer who replaced the Wallachian minister-of-war, then absent, was, that the Wallachians were wrong—that they should humour (ménager) the Austrians. Stirbey said it was an unfortunate affair, and forbade the newspapers to speak of it; and so it was hushed up, as all similar occurrences had invariably been.

Abandoned by their prince and natural protector to the tender mercies of foreign intruders and tyrants, the Wallachians testified their hatred and anger by the only means in their power. They excluded the Austrians from their society, and refused to have any intercourse with them. The offensive strangers were sent to Coventry; only in a very few houses was an Austrian uniform ever seen, and those were the houses of persons known by their connection with or partiality to Austria, and who got little credit with their fellow-countrymen by their deviation from the rule tacitly but generally laid down. The Austrians knew that they were detested, and requited the aversion shown them by being as insolent and disagreeable as they could. For all parties it was a most uncomfortable state of things, resulting in constant mutual annoyances. In June, the Austrian infantry regiment of Constantine gave an entertainment to General Coronini, then commanding in chief in the Principalities. Marquees were pitched on a grassy plain, at a short distance from Bucharest, and there were bands of music, rifle-practice, fireworks, and other amusements. Numerous invitations were distributed, but scarcely any Wallachians went, and the consequence was a lamentable deficiency of ladies. A Wallachian nobleman of high rank, and notorious for his Austrian addictions, gave a dinner to General Coronini before his departure. It was not thought necessary to inform all the persons invited of the occasion of the banquet; probably because it was thought that, if they knew it, some of them would refuse to attend. The consequence was that a portion of the guests, upon seeing whom they were assembled to honour, considered that a trick had been played them; and one of them, a member of one of the oldest and most distinguished families of the country—not of Fanariot origin, but of pure Rouman blood—kept his seat, and left his glass untasted, when the health of the Austrian commander was proposed. I might cite many other examples of the bad feeling and petty warfare between Wallachians and Austrians. The physical superiority being all on the side of the armed foreigners, it was seldom that force was opposed to their aggressions. The only instance I remember was in the case of a plucky little French architect, settled at Bucharest. Some soldiers in his house ill-treated his servant-maid and child, and upon his interfering, one of them raised his arm as if to strike him. But the Frenchman, although a very small man, was a master in the science of the savate; his blood was up, and he cared nothing for odds. A tremendous kick in the belly laid one soldier on his back; another was knocked into a well in the yard, and a third kicked out of the place. In short, the Frenchman completely cleared his premises, but, for some time afterwards, he was obliged to have a sentry to protect his house, for the Austrians came to force their way in and massacre him.

The murder, in cold blood and broad daylight, by a party of Austrians, of one of the French soldiers in charge of the telegraph, was followed by a serious investigation, and the guilty persons were severely punished. This was a lesson which doubtless had its effect. At about the same time the number of Austrian troops in the Principalities was diminished by the departure of several regiments. Stirbey also was removed from power, to the great and universal joy of the Wallachians, and was succeeded by Prince Alexander Ghika, a man of very moderate capacity, but well-meaning and honest, and who certainly is incapable of shielding or conniving at Austrian misconduct. Since then outrages have been much less frequent, and the Moldo-Wallachians do not appear to have particular grounds of complaint. A foreign military occupation is of course, and must inevitably be, to a certain degree, a burthen and a nuisance to the country that undergoes it.

Independently of the very sufficient reasons already exposed, the people of the Principalities had, or believed themselves to have, a strong political motive for desiring the departure of the Austrian army. A project for the union of the two provinces under a foreign prince had been put forward, and was ardently advocated and agitated by persons who imagined that they saw in its realisation the regeneration of their country. To this project the Austrian government was understood to be decidedly opposed; the Austrian political agent at Bucharest declared his disapproval of it in the most public and contemptuous manner, and with that overbearing insolence of tone which the subserviency of the hospodar emboldened him upon all occasions to assume; the Austrian officers, including a body of engineers and their assistants, then occupied in making a trigonometrical survey of the country, were generally accused of inciting the lower orders against the Union. Such opposition to a plan which they somewhat hastily believed would prove a panacea for all the many griefs they have so long suffered under, greatly increased the irritation of the Moldo-Wallachians. Their minds were set upon the Union, and dazzled by visions of the prosperity and power it was to bring in its train. They already beheld Rouman nationality restored and established on a firm basis, and an agricultural Belgium arising in the East, which should rival that of the West in good government, tranquillity, and wealth. They beheld the men of their race, of whom several millions now dwell in Transylvania, Bukovina, the Banat, and Bessarabia, and also in Podolia, Hungary, and Macedonia, flocking back to the provinces whence many of them originally emigrated, and supplying the labour which alone is wanted to make Moldo-Wallachia the granary of Europe. There can be no question that the Roumans have preserved their nationality to an extent that is surprising, when we consider the bloody struggle they have had to maintain against Turks and Tartars, Poles and Magyars, and the numerous races amongst which they have been scattered, often in far inferior numbers. There seems to be an innate sentiment of nationality amongst the lower orders, of which they themselves have not the intelligence. In emigration (and, owing to the oppressions of foreign armies and native chiefs, emigrations have been frequent and extensive) they preserve their native usages, often even when bad, sooner than adopt foreign ones. The same is the case with their language. In Bulgaria, Transylvania, and elsewhere, they still speak the Rouman. One of the most intelligent and distinguished of living Wallachians, John Ghika, now governor of Samos, estimates the Rouman race (in an interesting pamphlet, published at Paris under the anagrammatic pseudonyme of G. Chainoi) at nearly twelve millions. Of these, barely five millions dwell in Wallachia and Moldavia, where there is not only room for, but need of, at least double the population. In presence of these facts and figures, the chiefs of the national party in these provinces built up a scheme, of which the principal heads were: the union of the two Principalities into a constitutional monarchy, under a foreign prince not belonging to the royal family of any one of the countries bordering on Moldo-Wallachia,—that is to say, neither Austrian nor Russian; the independence of the new kingdom to be guaranteed by the European powers; a standing army sufficiently strong to defend the frontier in case of foreign aggression, at least until such time as succours might arrive from the guaranteeing powers. And that the rights of Turkey might not wholly be lost sight of, it was proposed to continue paying her the tribute to which she is entitled, or to buy it off by a sum once paid down. Thus constituted, it was argued, Moldavia and Wallachia would form a much more solid bulwark for Turkey against Russian aggression, than they do in their present unsettled dependence.

This is the rose-colour view of the question of the Union taken by the politicians of the Principalities, and especially by a knot of ardent young men who would fain apply political theories imbibed during their education and residence in foreign countries, and for which they do not perceive that their own is not yet ripe. Nearly a year ago they had gone so far as earnestly to discuss what prince should be placed over them, and warmly to debate whether one or two legislative chambers were preferable. Their eagerness blinded them to the fact that it would be scarcely possible to form an electoral constituency worthy of the name. The peasants, who compose the great mass of the population, are ignorant and degraded to a degree which renders them wholly unfit to be intrusted with the freeman’s rights of voting. They are by no means naturally vicious or destitute of good qualities, but these have had neither fair play nor cultivation. The Danubian serf—for, although nominally emancipated, he is no better than a serf—has been systematically oppressed and trampled upon. He is wholly uneducated, accustomed to blind obedience, unrequited toil, and many stripes—in fact, a slave. To give him a vote would be to place it at the disposal of the boyard on whose estate he lives. There exists, certainly, a class of small proprietors, especially in the mountainous parts of Wallachia, which might be taken advantage of as a sort of link between the ignorant and too often drunken peasant and the higher ranks. The artisans and people of the towns might also have votes, but at the best it would be a lame business, and it would be hard to prevent the real influence from being concentrated in the hands of the boyards, who hitherto have shown themselves anything but disposed to ameliorate the condition of their inferiors, and who would thus have it in their power to impose upon the constitutional sovereign such measures as were most to their own advantage. Before seeking to establish in so backward a country as Moldo-Wallachia that constitutional liberty for whose permanent enjoyment so few of the most civilised kingdoms of Europe have as yet shown themselves ripe, a vast deal has to be done by a government of a more absolute nature. The intellectual progress of the people—or, it should rather be said, their escape from utter moral darkness—needs to be facilitated by juster dealing and material improvements. Schools and roads are wanted, and a ruler who will check with a strong hand the oppressions and cruelties of the boyards, and the villanies of the middlemen and usurers to whom the unfortunate boor sells his future labour for bread and brandy. The earnings of the peasants, especially of those composing what are called the second and third classes, are so small that their existence appears a miracle. In the event of failure of crops, murrain amongst cattle, or any other of the serious but not unfrequent calamities to which agriculturists are liable—also in the event of a military occupation, which is worse than hail or rot—the most fortunate class of peasants cannot expect to pull through the year without incurring debt. As to the man of the lowest class, he is invariably and at all times in debt. He gets small loans from the Jew and Greek middlemen, at enormous interest, which is added to the capital every two or three months. His only means of payment is by labour, for which his taskmaster, profiting by his misery, credits him at a very low rate, until, from less to more, he sinks into the condition of absolute serfdom, and finds his whole year’s toil the property of another.

To examine in detail the social and political condition of the Danubian Principalities, would cover much paper, and probably be of small interest to English readers; but it may be possible to give in short compass a clear general notion of their position relatively to Turkey. The original treaties by which they accepted the protection and suzerainty of the Porte, and which date from the sixteenth century, have long since been infringed and set at naught. According to these treaties, a tribute was to be the sole acknowledgment of Turkish supremacy; the Sultan was forbidden to interfere in the local administration, and the provinces were to elect their own princes. In defiance of this contract, the elective right was long ago set aside, the odious rule of the Greeks of the Fanar was introduced, and the post of hospodar became the prize of the highest bidder. The office became so profitable, owing to the unscrupulous means of enriching themselves resorted to by these Fanariot princes, that it was soon the object of eager competition. A system of intrigue and bribery was introduced which gave rise to continual changes in the government of the Principalities, and accustomed the Porte to look upon them as farms to be let to the highest bidders. The Greek farmers were deposed and recalled whenever the offers and promises of others of their countrymen appeared more advantageous.

“From the period at which this system was introduced, to the beginning of the present century,” says Wilkinson (whose work, although now of old date, will be found valuable by persons desirous of tracing from an early period the not uninteresting history of the Principalities),[6] “being a space of ninety years, Wallachia alone has passed through the hands of forty different princes, independently of the time it was occupied by the Russians, from 1770 to 1774, by the Austrians and Russians from 1789 to 1792, and by the Russians, again, from 1806 to 1812. The evils which naturally arose from such a state of things weighed so heavily on the two nations, that the court of Russia, already authorised by the treaty of Kainardjik[7] to interfere in their behalf, insisted at the peace of Jassy, in 1792, that the Porte should engage to maintain the princes of Moldavia and Wallachia in their respective stations for the space of seven years, and should not molest them in any manner previously to the expiration of that term.”

In the sequel this agreement was by no means regularly observed, and its frequent infractions by Turkey led to continual remonstrances from Russia. The former power had long completely lost sight of the obligations imposed upon her by her treaties with the Principalities, and no stronger proof of this can be adduced than her cession to Russia, by the treaty of Bucharest, in 1812, of nearly half Moldavia, from the Dniester to the Pruth, now forming the Russian province of Bessarabia, a portion of which has been restored by the recent treaty of Paris. According to the capitulations, which to this very day are legally in force, the Porte had no more right to dispose of that territory than it had to grant the temporary sovereignty of the provinces to the greedy and venal Greeks of the Fanar. But the stipulated immunities and autonomy of the Moldo-Wallachians had long been disregarded and trodden under foot; they could do nothing against the power of Turkey; and Russia, whilst seeming to sympathise with them, joyfully beheld, in the oppressive and illegal conduct of their suzerain, a means of herself acquiring influence amongst them, and perhaps of eventually bringing them under her own rule. To do this she reckoned upon the services and assistance of her party amongst the boyards, the majority of whom, although claiming to be old nobility, are of mushroom origin and Greek descent. For the last 150 years the services of the boyards are to be sought, not in the patriotic annals of their country, but in the archives of the Fanar or of St Petersburg. It was from those amongst them devoted to Russia, and including Bibesco and Stirbey, upstart names now held in abhorrence in Wallachia, that were selected the members of the commission appointed, at the close of the war that commenced in 1828, to draw up, under the superintendence of Kisseleff, the Organic Regulations or new Constitution of the Principalities. This constitution professed to vindicate and insure the rights of the peasantry; but, although plausible enough in the letter, the manner in which it practically worked may be inferred from the new and extensive emigration that quickly followed its promulgation, and from the wholesale departure of rich Bulgarian colonies, which, encouraged by the just rule of Gregory Ghika, had settled in Wallachia previously to 1828.

From the date of the treaty of Adrianople until the commencement of the late war, Russia was all-powerful in the Principalities, and that period, of nearly a quarter of a century, is marked by repeated acts of base submission on the part of Turkey, humiliating to herself, and treacherous to the provinces to which she had promised protection and the maintenance of their rights. In 1839 a firman granted to Russia the right of controlling the acts of the Rouman National Assembly. In the same year Alexander Ghika was dismissed from the hospodariat, because he was displeasing to Russia. In 1844, the Wallachian Assembly was suspended for having rejected a project of law by which the monopoly of working the mines of the province would have been secured to a Russian company. Finally, in 1849, the Porte subscribed the Sened of Balta Liman, by which she upset all the institutions of the Principalities, and made a Russian commissioner their legislator and administrator.

For a period extending far beyond the memory of the oldest man amongst them, the Moldavians and Wallachians have thus been the sport of rival and intriguing powers. They have been deceived and oppressed by the Porte, and sold again and again to the best bidder; they have been the prey of the vilest Greek adventurers, who have done their best to introduce amongst them their own principles of falsehood and corruption; they have been taxed and squeezed by successive foreign rulers, who saw in their brief period of power only a favourable opportunity of filling their pockets; they have been harassed and impoverished by foreign military occupations, which ceased only to be renewed. Russia, whilst affecting, with crocodile tears, to commiserate and deplore their unhappy condition, has secretly fomented their vexations, griefs, and miseries, in hopes of their ultimately throwing themselves into her arms. The triumph of the Allies has at last delivered them, at least for the time, from these conflicting and noxious influences, and given them hopes that Europe will do something to secure their future welfare. Something ought to be, and it is to be hoped will be, done for them; but important considerations may render it impossible to grant them all that they, carried away, after long suffering, by the prospect of a brighter future, desire and demand. There should be secured to them the opportunity and means of moral and material improvement, and as much liberty and self-government as they are fitted to enjoy and able to make good use of. Their sudden elevation, after they have so long been sunk in degradation and almost in slavery, into a constitutional kingdom on the model of Belgium or Piedmont, whilst the most sagacious amongst them possess as yet scarcely the rudiments of political education, would be at best, and setting apart considerations of European policy that oppose themselves to it and demand due weight, a hazardous experiment, and one which for their own sakes it may be thought hardly advisable to try, since it is of a class that has hitherto been found more fertile in failures than in successes. It is one which the majority of the powers who are to decide upon the question are not likely to risk. Russia is understood to be favourable to the project, but that alone is a sufficient reason for regarding it with mistrust. She doubtless reckons on the powerful influences and successful intrigues she might bring to bear on a young kingdom adjoining her own frontier. France has somewhat ostentatiously put herself forward as an advocate of the Union under a foreign prince; but it is now more than suspected that Russian arguments have had undue weight with certain prominent members of the French government and advisers of the French Emperor. England, Austria, and Turkey, and also Sardinia, will oppose the dangerous scheme, and with good reason; for although the Moldo-Wallachians, who have an abundantly high opinion of their own capacities and merits, imagine that, were their wishes complied with, they should within a very short time offer to Europe the edifying example of an Oriental Belgium, it is feared by those who know them best that there would be at least as great a chance of their scandalising it by the deplorable spectacle of a second Greece.

LETTERS FROM A LIGHTHOUSE.—NO. I.

My dear Ebony,—If you still retain in your composition one drop of the milk of human kindness, the reappearance of an old contributor, whom doubtless you long ago considered as irretrievably lost or strayed, must impart to you a thrill of pleasure. At all events, it ought to do so: for, though I say it, there seems to have been a sad falling-off in power and stamina since I withdrew from the literary ring. Nine years ago, when I regularly stained paper in your service, the world was brisk and bustling. All of us had drunk more or less deeply of the Circean cup of speculation; and though the hour of retribution, or rather of paying up calls, was nigh at hand, we had not yet been summoned to partake of the soda-water of repentance. The political game was fast and exciting. There was a clear, distinct, and obvious contest of principles; and it was a real gratification to see how valiantly men on either side would stand forth and fisticuff their opponents. The forehead of the Manchester Goliath was a first-rate mark for the sling of the Conservative David; and many a time have I groaned with pleasure over the prostrate carcass of a Quaker Philistine. All things seemed flourishing, when a heavy shadow passed over me and my fortunes. Don’t be alarmed. I have no intention of troubling you with details which I did not think it necessary at the time to divulge to a Court of Bankruptcy. I have no creditors now. The misfortunate creatures who arrogated to themselves that absurd and empty title, have long since bolted also. In fact, if I had not been an ass, I might easily have got rid of the whole of them by adopting the simple expedient of tarrying incognito for the space of a twelvemonth at Dalnacardoch, where a friend of mine, a duiniewassail of the house of M‘Tavish, who was largely engaged in the process of illicit distillation, would willingly have afforded me shelter. However, I committed the grievous mistake of outrunning, not the constable, but my creditors. I shall never forget the kind manner in which you acceded to my request for an advance of an hundred pounds, on the strength of future articles. Your liberality was not thrown away, for the money you gave me materially facilitated my departure, and enabled me to take my leave with that calmness, decorum, and equanimity which become a gentleman. I mention this for the purpose of showing you that I am not oblivious of such favours, though I should be the last man in the world to insult you by hinting at repayment after the lapse of so much time. Indeed you will not expect to receive any such paltry proposal, as the debt must be long ago prescribed. But what is friendship, if not based upon gratitude and confidence? Therefore understand, that, if you print this letter or any other lucubration of mine, I shall consider myself your creditor (at a short date) on the same terms as before; unless, indeed, you have raised the literary tariff since the period of our former connection, in which case I shall gladly avail myself of any reasonable increment.

Business first—pleasure afterwards. That was always my motto; and I already feel that I can write more easily, and express myself more felicitously, now that I have discharged this debt upon my conscience. I have been, it is true, a little out of practice; for amongst the various kinds of thirst which affected the Californian diggers and the Norfolk Island whalers, with whom respectively I sojourned for considerable periods, I did not observe that for literature exorbitantly developed. Neither were the Bashi-Bazouks, in which honourable corps of irregulars I held an honourable commission, and whom I might, could, would, or should have led on to glory, had they not preferred devoting their energies to the expiscation of hen-roosts, the discovery of secret cellars, and such-like baubles—neither, I say, were the Bashi-Bazouks a hard-reading set. Indeed they rather appeared to incline to the tenets of that capital old cock, Caliph Omar, whom it is the fashion to abuse because he burned the Alexandrian library. I am sure that if he were alive again, and could contrive to make a bonfire of every book that has been printed since Gutenberg drew his first proof-sheet, he would be regarded as a blessed benefactor by every man who now earns his livelihood by handling the pen. Positively my mouth waters at the bare idea of such a thing! Living authors would then have the whole monopoly, and might fix their own prices; and we should have none of those rascally reprints of the works of the defunct, which interfere so materially with our sales. But indulgence in such extravagant dreams is useless, and even criminal. I simply mean to observe that, while among my friends the Bashis, I had not much opportunity of giving my nights and days to the study of Addison, or Alison, or Tennyson, or Emerson, or any other son of woman born; so that, perhaps, my style may, for some little time, appear deficient in grace and polish. But since I came here (I shall presently tell you what I mean by here, and how I obtained the exceedingly desirable situation which I now enjoy), I have had plenty leisure for reading, and have gradually unstacked a pile of reviews, big enough, and I must add heavy enough, to sink a respectable steam-tug. I have read, sir, very nearly through the whole periodical literature of Great Britain published during the last eight years; and I have arrived at the deliberate conclusion that the said floating literature has been gradually becoming water-logged, and is in great danger of disappearing, like the mysterious islet on Lochlomond.

Time was when the Quarterlies supplied a stock of reading, which, if not very pungent, was at least easy of digestion, suited to the comprehension of the numerous class of consumers who do not affect unusual profundity, and occasionally relieved by a touch of something which it was possible to mistake for humour. But all that has disappeared. The new brood of contributors are much too learned for their audience, and you might as well look for liveliness at an undertaker’s wedding, as within the pages of a Quarterly Review. I read a number of one of them—I won’t specify which—no later than last night, under the reflector; and, do you know, it positively gave me a fit of colic. Six or eight fellows, each more heavy-sterned than the other, trudged by in succession, bearing burdens of bosh upon their shoulders; just as I have seen, on a tearing wet day, some of my Bashi-Bazouks straggle in from a plundering expedition, one bending beneath a load of dripping mats not worth an asper, another sweating under the abandoned pack-saddle of a camel, and a third carrying a dead goat in an advanced stage of putrefaction. I protest to you, Ebony, that I have a very great regard in the abstract for the ancients, and am willing to take (or affect) as much interest in their quondam doings as can possibly be expected from a gentleman whose fortune it was to be born some two thousand years or so after their time; but is it reasonable to expect me to wade through some thirty or forty mortal pages devoted to the subject of the Peloponnesian war? I like the Orientals, who, after all, have some sound notions on the subjects of coffee and tobacco; but why should I be solicited to bother my brains with criticisms upon the Coptic grammar? My chief objection to Egypt is its fleas; but, at a pinch—or rather in spite of innumerable pinches—I might bring myself to submit even to that nuisance, and enjoy in comparative tranquillity the really salubrious air of the heritage of the Pharaohs, provided I were not perpetually pestered by jabbering about hieroglyphs, and monoliths, and Orus, and Osiris, and the beetles, and the Ibis, and the leeks, and the crocodiles, and Necho, and Psammis, and Rhamses (who was no relation of the Dalhousies), and other myths, reptiles, vegetables, and divinities, who at one time molested the Delta. I had the pleasure, a couple of years ago, of kicking, after various warnings, a British antiquarian out of a coffee-house in Cairo; and he ought to feel very grateful to me for having done so, as otherwise he would have been poniarded to a certainty at a later period of the evening. Well, sir; last night, in the course of my reading, I recognised my old friend, in the pages of the review, by marks which I hold to be infallible: for you must know that, before my patience gave way altogether, I had imparted to him divers startling details touching discoveries in Upper Egypt, which occurred to me (I was drinking rum and water at the time, and the lymph of the Nile from a porous jar is, I assure you, when properly qualified, very seductive tipple) as extremely probable to be made in localities whereof I had not the slightest knowledge; and—will you believe it?—the caitiff has actually embodied in his article the results of my sublime and extemporaneous researches! If it ever should be my lot to fall in with him near Nineveh, he may expect a sterner measure of justice and retribution. Next comes an ecclesiastical monomaniac, maundering—O me—about the Council of Chalcedon! I thought we really had done with councils. Most of us of the Protestant way of thinking, are well pleased to be rid, once and for ever, of a controversy which was understood to have been settled at the Reformation; and we are entitled to object to its revival. So about Italian history. We don’t want to hear about Duke Sforza this, or Count Paolo that;—the record of their crimes, intrigues, murders, rapes, and adulteries ought to have no manner of interest, and really has none, except to a few antiquarians with diseased appetites;—and if deeds of this kind are worthy of promulgation at this time of day, I am serious in thinking that we do injustice to such native heroes as Turpin and Abershaw, by giving the foreigners a decided quarterly preference. Next I observe that an awful deal of drivel is current about Niebuhr and the Romans. I know something about Niebuhr; and I always esteemed him a prig. He was a regular old, pottering, professional German humbug—one of your why-and-wherefore men, who looked regularly twice at each side of his kalbs-braten, and would not have taken upon trust an ordinary report of a police trial from the columns of the Times. He was as little susceptible of poetical feeling or inspiration as an ink-fish or a polypus; and thought—for the conceit of the animal was unbounded—that he knew far more about Roman history than either Livy or Ovid. It humbly appears to me that, in dealing with the history of such remote times, the man who, without absolute information enabling him to substitute truth for falsehood, flies in the face of tradition, is a blockhead. Tradition is much older than he is, and infinitely more respectable; and if he cannot disprove it by evidence, he is bound to let it stand. What is the use of all this captious infidelity? What does Niebuhr give us in exchange for the story of Romulus and Remus, or any of the glowing early legends of Rome, which, despite of the ultra-grammarian tendencies of too many pedagogues, have, for centuries, roused the curiosity and emulation of our youth, except the vision of a duffle-clad professor, with a pipe in his mouth, attempting, in uncleanly fashion, to blow away the settled belief of ages! And all this passes current under the title of profound criticism! Then what with philology, archæology, ontology, epistemology, and æsthetics, a plain fellow like myself feels as though he had lodged surreptitiously in Bedlam. Lads, in their second year at college, patter away in a jargon more perplexing than that of the swell-mob or the gypsies, and discuss the science of mind instead of occupying themselves with the gustative enjoyment of tarts. One very marked feature of the age is the growth and excessive multiplication of what are facetiously called philosophical institutes. I conjecture, from the multitude of advertisements and circulars which have reached me, that there is now hardly a village throughout the country without its lecture-room, for the purpose of affording an easy vent to the available talent and ready impudence of the district. Lairds, dominies, dissenting ministers, enthusiastic excisemen, and philanthropic collectors of the revenue, seem to avail themselves with the utmost eagerness of these opportunities of displaying the vast treasures of thought and information stored up in their respectable brains; and they rant, declaim, speculate, or mumble over every imaginable subject—politics, poetry, religion, or railways, causality, cookery, or consciousness. Noble lords and members of the House of Commons, of all shades of opinion, have been pressed into the service. One day Lord John Russell drones upon the subject of history; on the next, Sir Robert Peel is heard spouting the poetry of Mrs Hemans. And on all sides, from every corner, nook, and cranny, rises a dreary hum about education, which possibly might be considered as a hopeful symptom, provided any two people could be found to agree as to the exact meaning of the term.

Far be it from me to object to this general expansion of the public mind. I fully concur in the observation made a few weeks ago by the chairman of the Cowcaddens’ Mechanics Institute, that every man possesses, upon some particular topic, a stock of information which he is bound to communicate for the advantage of his fellow-creatures: and, along with him, I expect the advent of the time when the number of the British lecturers shall exceed that of their collective audiences. I sometimes experience a feeling of regret that my present circumstances and position preclude me from taking an active hand in the game, so long as there is a chance of profit. I am quite certain that I could get up a stunning course upon less than a fortnight’s warning; and by shifting my ground dexterously from one institute to another, I have no doubt that I should be able to pick up guineas as fast as a pigeon gathers peas. But, after all, it is a great matter to bear a contented mind. I never envied any one, being of opinion that there is always a skeleton in the closet; and recent events have convinced me that this is the true philosophy. Look at Paul the banker, Sadleir, Redpath, Cameron—what has been the upshot of all their wealth and prosperity? Hang me if I would not rather cut kelp at sixpence a-day than be a director of the Bank of England! Then as to power—what is the good of that? Nobody in our time has had a longer lease of it than Johnny Russell, and yet where is his reputation now? Where be his followers, the men who used to cheer him so vociferously—who were so lavish of their adulation, so perfectly slavish to his will? Dancing at the back of Palmerston, like so many fantoccini, and shrugging their shoulders with affected pity for the misfortunes of their former leader! Where is Cobden now? No man in my day, barring O’Connell, had a larger personal following than the redoubted crumpler-up of Russia, but somehow his adherents have melted from him, like snow at the breath of the thaw. Surely it would be better never to rise from obscurity at all, than, after a splendid meridian, to shiver in the eve of life under the cold shadows of contumely and neglect.

It is my belief that you men who dwell amidst the whirl and turmoil of public affairs, who are constantly engaged either in attack or defence, and whose brains are consequently kept spinning like a whirligig, are quite unfitted to take a philosophic view of any immediate subject, or to pronounce a candid opinion upon its merits. You are like the warriors on the plain of Troy, thrusting, foining, and contending for the armour of those who are down; and amidst the dust and stour of the battle, it is physically impossible that you can see anything at the distance of twenty yards. Very different is the position of us Olympians, who, from our elevated perch, in clear weather, can survey complacently all that is passing beneath, without allowing party feeling, or affection, or prejudice, to distort our deliberate judgments.

“For we lie beside our nectar, and the bolts are hurl’d

Far below us in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl’d

Round our golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world.”

But I forget that you are no Œdipus, and necessarily must think me crazy, unless I condescend to explanation.

Know, then, that after my return from the wars, without accepting a Pashalik, which was the very least that those ungrateful infidels should have offered me, I found myself nearly as much out at elbows as the Copper Captain or the redoubted Bobadil. Arrearages there were none; and I found myself wandering about the streets of London, with a magnificent beard, a seedy greatcoat, galligaskins that had seen better days, and a very few shillings in my pocket. I believe—at least I have been told—that the British public was exceedingly excited and gratified by the return of the soldiers from the Crimea, and that all sorts of hospitalities were lavished upon the victors of Alma and Inkermann. Be that as it may, I can conscientiously aver that I did not profit, to the extent of a single beefsteak, by my military renown. True, I did not belong to the regulars, or even to the German Legion. I never saw Sebastopol, nor was I quartered at Heligoland. But that was no fault of mine. Had I, with my brave Bashis, been moved forward to the van of fight, I flatter myself that—but I will not pursue the subject further. Suffice it to say, that I received no medals, and no allowances, and that I was twice requested by the police to exhibit my ticket-of-leave. Suspicion is a horrid thing, and apt to unsettle even the best-regulated mind. I began to ponder within myself whether it were worth while to be suspected without a cause; and had Mephistopheles displayed his usual diabolic activity on the night of the display of fireworks, I really do think that I might have been overpersuaded to try my hand at the garotte. I was, however, such a very dilapidated Faustus, that the demon passed me by as if I were not worth his notice; and with the return of morning, virtue reassumed her sway. I then bethought me that in other and more fortunate days I was known to certain individuals now holding office under the beneficent administration of the Whigs; and, as it was notorious that some very loose fish had recently been patronised by that respectable faction, I thought it not impossible that they might cast a few crumbs of comfort in the way of a meritorious veteran who was always ready to serve his country for an extremely moderate consideration. So, after making what toilet I could, I laid siege to the public offices, being fully determined that my old besetting sin of modesty should not this time, at all events, prove a bar to my advancement, and that no one whom I was privileged to accost should hereafter be able to plead ignorance as an excuse for having overlooked my claims. Nor was I at all particular as to the kind of employment. Any of the newly-created offices in the gift of the Secretary of the War Department would have suited me like a kid-glove. Had my godfathers and godmothers been gifted with sufficient prescience to bestow upon me the name of Dowb, I might possibly have been taken care of; but, alas! I had no part or portion in that sacred monosyllable. Flights of harpies had been before me; and they had swept away even the most insignificant remnants of the banquet. Go where I might, I met with nothing save incivility and official insolence; until at last one friend, more true than the others, purchased my evacuation of his lobby, in which I had permanently encamped myself, by procuring for me a nomination as an assistant light-keeper. Yes—you may well stare, and drop the paper as you read! “Is it possible,” you will say—or you ought to say—“that our ancient and illustrious contributor, a man of such varied learning and minute accomplishment, &c. &c., should be so depressed by fortune as to immure himself within the narrow precincts of a lonely Pharos?” Well—why not? The work is easy and regular, provided you can keep awake; and the pay and perquisites by no manner of means to be despised. Government is good enough to find us in all manner of victual and appurtenances (save liquor, which is somewhat churlishly prohibited); you have comfortable lodgings, prime air, wholesome exercise in ascending the stair, and the most magnificent of sea-views, either in calm or in storm. Add to this, your absolute immunity, nowhere else to be enjoyed in the British islands, from all visits of those disagreeable savages the tax-gatherers; and it will require no exorbitant stretch of fancy to imagine worse quarters. The society, no doubt, is limited, but then it has the advantage of being select. Archy M‘Craw, my principal, is a superannuated sergeant of a Highland regiment, who remembers Waterloo, and has a settled belief in the authenticity of Ossian; and when he produces his stores of anecdote about Picton and Fingal—heroes whose deeds he is rather apt to confound—he is anything but stupid company. His helpmate, Elspeth, is a nice tidy old body, somewhat addicted to snuff and the perusal of Boston’s Fourfold State, but extremely obliging; and her talents in the concoction of an Irish stew are by no means despicable. Like all genuine Highlanders, M‘Craw has a proper respect for birth and education; and as he knows that my circumstances are now somewhat altered from what they have been, he is courteous in his demeanour, and, instead of trying to impose upon me, as a newcomer, additional labour, I observe that he is most anxious to lighten my burden. So upon the whole we get on capitally, and I do not know that I was ever more comfortable than now. I was always a consumer of the midnight oil, which the Government now provides for me gratis; and I have plenty of time for reading in the long watch beneath the glow of the reflectors. As for the wind and rain—of which, it must be confessed, there is rather a superabundance here—one becomes used to them after a certain period of probation; indeed I rather like a storm, as the roaring of the elements tends to stir poetical ideas, which otherwise might be apt to stagnate. I wrote a most capital description of an eruption of Vesuvius, a few nights ago, during one of the most violent gales that ever swept this Sound. Then, during the daytime, after polishing the mirrors and making up the log-book, I have plenty of leisure for meditation. Our lighthouse is perched upon a cliff some three hundred feet above the sea, and there is a long sloping hillside behind, where our cattle and ponies graze, which leads down to the beach. There is prime fishing all about; and the sea-fowl are so prolific in the matter of eggs, that, at the proper season, it would not be difficult, from our rocks alone, to furnish a daily ration of omelette to every soldier in the British army. Then there is a reef on which the seals at ebb-tide come up to bask, and, as I have not parted with my rifle, I have had some pretty sport, and have even turned an honest penny by the disposal of the peltry. On the whole, I should say, after much experience of life in different phases, that there is no more agreeable post for a man who unites in himself the combined characters of philosopher, sportsman, and student, than that of a keeper of a lighthouse; and I would not, with my present feelings, change places with the venerated Palmerston. I warrant me I am much more comfortable while reading the columns of the Magazine (by the way, do not forget to send me the numbers in future—I have borrowed the last few from the parish minister), by the mild effulgence of the Stella maris, than he is while compelled, long after midnight, to listen to the dreary debates in the House of Commons, cursing all the while the imbecility of his supporters, who attempt to copy his jocular manner, without possessing a tithe of his ability. If the noble viscount had been but ten years younger, I would have strenuously recommended him to isolate himself for a twelvemonth in a lighthouse. If he were to undergo such a contemplative ordeal, I am ready to stake my life that on his emergence he would make a clean sweep of such preposterous and exhaustive satellites as the two Peels, Bernal Osborne, Sir Charles Wood, Vernon Smith, and Mr Robert Lowe; and would have tried at least to reconstruct his Administration on the principle of common sense, if he could not command a more exalted kind of talent. But the Premier, with all his dexterity, official experience, and sleight-of-hand, is, for the present, like a theatrical manager at the head of a most sorry corps dramatique, the members of whom he must shift as occasion requires; and were his own performances not extremely adroit, he could hardly hope to escape the envenomed hiss which is the sure signal of dissolution.

I will tell you why I make these observations. The last mail brought me an account of a discourse, lately delivered by the present Sir Robert Peel, at the opening of some kind of museum in the neighbourhood of Birmingham, which you, as the conductor of an important organ of public opinion, are bound to notice in terms of the severest reprobation. However disposed men may be in this indulgent country of ours, to pass over youthful follies, or to palliate more matured eccentricities, some guarantee is required that those who are advanced to responsible offices, and who are paid servants of the Crown, shall, in that capacity, maintain ordinary decorum, and, whatever their private impressions, impulses, or desires may be, conform to that decency which is the duty of all officials. Sir Robert Peel was among the number of those selected to represent the Court of St James’s at the recent coronation of the Emperor of Russia: a ceremony of no ordinary mark and significance, occurring as it did immediately after the termination of the war. Of the wisdom of the selection made, I need say nothing, as I believe upon that point there is no divided opinion in the public mind. But whether the choice was good or bad, judicious or extremely imprudent, the fact remains that Sir Robert Peel went to Russia, as a member of the Legation sent by Her Majesty Queen Victoria, to give a pledge and testimony of renewed amity between two of the mightiest nations of Europe. From a man intrusted with so high a function, not only is the utmost degree of circumspection required during the period occupied by the discharge of his duties, but an entire suppression of his private and personal opinions. Gentlemen connected with the press, or adventurous tourists who went to Moscow in a private capacity, were perfectly free on their return to lay before the public their impressions and sentiments. Some of them have done so; but in so far as I have had the opportunity of observing, in no instance has anything been written which could by possibility give offence to Russia, or tend to increase the irritation which will sometimes linger even after peace has been restored. But Peel stood altogether in a different position. He was not only a subordinate member of the Ministry, but a special delegate; and therefore he was doubly bound to use caution, and to abstain from unguarded speech. Yet no sooner does this favoured statesman return to his own country, than we find him, on an occasion quite unsuited for the introduction of such a topic, commenting upon his Russian experiences in terms which would have disgraced the meanest mountebank that ever spouted on a platform. Everything in Russia, according to Sir Robert Peel, is deception and imposture. The Empress, by a fine stroke of humour, was represented by him as appearing at the coronation “with her hair dishevelled, looking like Norma in the opera.” Not in coarser, but not in better taste is his reference to the Archduke Constantine. “The Marble Palace is the residence of that ‘frank and open-hearted sailor,’ Constantine. How I laughed when I read that description of Constantine’s character! With all respect to his highness, I must say that I never saw a man who gave me less of the impression of a ‘frank and open-hearted sailor.’ It is all soft sawder, you know.” Now, setting aside the ineffable vulgarity of the man’s discourse, I would just ask what kind of sensation would be created in England, if a representative from the United States, sent to attend the coronation of Queen Victoria, had, on his return home, used such offensive language? Why, the whole British press, from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s, would have been vociferous in denunciation of the outrage, as a breach not only of public duty, but of private manners; and Judge Lynch would have been recommended to take immediate steps for the punishment of the insolent offender. I have no great faith in the plenitude of American courtesy; but I do verily believe that it would be impossible to find, within the compass of Yankee-land, a single man of ordinary education and breeding, who, after having been accredited as was this individual, Peel, would so have spoken of the royal family of Great Britain. The effect of such a speech as this, upon foreigners, must be twofold. In the first place, they cannot but consider it, proceeding from the mouth of a member of the Administration, as a pregnant sign that a bad and rancorous feeling towards Russia still exists among the British people. In the second place, they will take it as a proof of the assertion which ere now has been made, that the British aristocracy are no longer pre-eminently distinguished for politeness, courtesy, and high-toned chivalry; for we cannot expect foreigners to be intimately acquainted with the antecedents of the house of Peel.

“I look upon it,” says Machiavelli, “as one of the greatest points of discretion in a man, to forbear injury and threatening, especially in words. Neither of them weakens the enemy; but threatening makes him more cautious, and injury the more inveterate and industrious to revenge it. Nothing provokes and incenses a man so highly as to have his imperfections reaped up: whether in earnest or in jest, ’tis the same thing. Nam facetiæ asperæ, quando nimium ex vero traxere, acrem sui memoriam relinquunt. For biting raillery, especially with a tincture of truth, leaves an ill impression on the memory.” I do not, of course, suppose that Peel has any acquaintance with the writings of the famous Florentine; but he may, possibly, have looked into the works of Lord Bacon; and if so, it is a pity that he has forgotten the following passage: “As for jest, there be certain things which ought to be privileged from it; namely, religion, matters of state, great persons, any man’s present business of importance, and any case which deserveth pity. Yet there be some that think their wits have been asleep except they dart out somewhat that is piquant and to the quick. That is a vein which would be bridled;

Parce puer stimulis, et fortius utere loris.

And, generally, men ought to find the difference between saltness and bitterness. Certainly, he that hath a satirical vein, as he maketh others afraid of his wit, so he had need be afraid of others’ memory.” The conclusion of which last sentence Sir Robert Peel has peculiar reason to study.

But this is not all. It was not enough for the Palmerstonian protegé to insult Russia—he must also have a fling at the representatives of our nearer allies. The following is his account of Count de Morny, the representative of France. “We were presented at the coronation by Count de Morny, the French ambassador, a spick-and-span man of considerable aplomb, and who, by the way, is one of the greatest speculators in the world. He speculates in everything, and bought a lot of pictures to sell again and make a profit of.” The intense indecency of this is only equalled by its vulgarity. No man with the real feelings of a gentleman would so have spoken publicly of another, for whose good offices he was, moreover, indebted. “Spick-and-span man!” Why, the veriest bagman that ever perambulated the Midland Counties would blush if convicted of having used such language. I should like to know what Sir Robert Peel would have thought if Count de Morny, at some public meeting in France, had regaled his audience by personal allusions of a similar kind, for which there is no lack whatever of current material. Presently comes the turn of the ambassador sent by the uncle of Queen Victoria. “Then came the ambassador of the smallest kingdom in Europe—Belgium—the Prince de Ligne, the very picture of swelling insignificance; so swelling, indeed, that he could not, for the life of him, look down from the contemplation of his own importance.” Apart from the shameless personality of this sketch, which at once betrays the parvenu, the man has contrived in this sentence to exhibit a degree of ignorance sufficient to entitle him to a pluck if he offered himself for examination as a candidate for a portership in a public office. Belgium is so far from being the smallest kingdom in Europe, that, in point of population and revenue, which have always been considered the proper tests of the greatness of a state, it is superior to Portugal, Denmark, Bavaria, Hanover, Saxony, Würtemburg, and Greece. It has a larger population than Holland; a larger revenue than Naples, Sweden, or Sardinia; and a larger territorial extent than three of the kingdoms which I have mentioned. It is to be hoped that this instance of stupid and gross blunder on the part of a man who was shoved by paternal interest into important and diplomatic situations, will convince Sir Charles Trevelyan of the necessity of extending his system of examination beyond the rank of mere subordinates. However much Peel may in other respects resemble the renowned Katterfelto, who was the most famous jack-pudding of his day, he certainly has not acquired the secret of consummate dexterity and manipulation. It is highly improbable that the repute of the Prince de Ligne will suffer from the scratches of so coarse and clumsy a caricaturist. To this succeeds a touch of Tartuffe. “Then the representative of Naples, of whom, IN CHARITY, I will say nothing.” It is to be hoped, for the credit of Drayton Manor, that the representative of Naples will be inspired with the like Christian forbearance. Lastly comes the poor Turkish representative, of whom our pattern Englishman says: “You could not look at him without feeling that he was the representative of an effete and worn-out nation.” If nations are to be judged by their representatives, and if Great Britain is to be estimated according to the intellectual measurement of Peel, I protest that I would rather inscribe myself in the universal register as a Dog-ribbed Indian, than as a native of these islands.

But what incenses me more than anything else, is the excessive malignity exhibited by this flippant and absurd young man while speaking of Admiral Sir Charles Napier. It is not for me to hazard an opinion whether the admiral acted wisely or over-cautiously in abstaining from an attack upon Cronstadt, although the evidence, in so far as it has been made public, appears to be strong in his justification. The antecedents of Sir Charles Napier are such that it would be work of supererogation now to insist upon the courage, intrepidity, and daring, which he has so often conspicuously displayed. Of his former laurels, honourably gained and universally acknowledged, no breath of slander can deprive him. If old age is to be considered as a disqualification for public service, then the blame rests solely with the Lords of the Admiralty, who intrusted the charge of the Baltic fleet to a man on the verge of seventy. They ought to have known that if desperate service was required, a younger man than Napier would have been a more fitting leader; but I am not aware that service of that kind was expected, or that it was necessary in that stage of the war to attempt such a hazardous exploit as the bombardment of Cronstadt, unless the chances of success appeared greater than those of failure. Any serious disaster sustained by our fleet in the Baltic would have been not only a triumph to Russia, but an immense political advantage; the maintenance of the blockade was undeniably the chief object of the expedition; and therefore, the admiral was bound to weigh the consequences deliberately before attempting any extraordinary enterprise. Sir Charles Napier says that, with the force at his disposal, he did not consider himself justified in attacking Cronstadt; and in that view he was fortified by the opinion of the French admiral. Since then, the Earl of Dundonald, one of the bravest and most daring of British sailors, has expressed his deliberate opinion that Napier was perfectly right in abstaining from any such attempt, because, in all human probability, the result would have been futile, if not disastrous. With such authorities at his back, Sir Charles Napier might well afford to despise the insinuations of his silly persecutor; and I wish that he had done so, instead of flying into a passion, because he has been assailed by an insect. His evident annoyance served only to increase the malignity of the wasp who pursued him; until, in an evil hour for himself, the venomous creature committed a mistake, which ought, for the remainder of his existence, to put a stop to his buzzing. Sir Robert Peel had the temerity to assert that, in the course of conversation, the Archduke Constantine stated to him (Peel) that if Napier had attacked Cronstadt, the fortress must have fallen. Upon this, Napier writes to the Archduke, and receives in reply a letter distinctly stating that no such conversation took place! This, I must needs remark, gives a most serious complexion to the matter. Either the Archduke or Sir Robert Peel must be guilty of deliberate falsehood. Peel states that such a conversation was held—the Archduke denies it in toto. Which of them are we to believe?

All I can say is, that it seems to me a very unlikely thing that, under any circumstances, the Archduke should have selected an underling of the legation, with whom he had no previous acquaintance, as the depositary of his confidences; and tenfold more extraordinary, that he should have made so singular a revelation. What was the use of it? What could be his object? Had Constantine anything to gain by exposing the weakness or want of preparation of his country, in a matter so serious as the main defence and bulwark of St Petersburg? or is he so very “frank and open-hearted,” as to be in the habit of blurting out state-secrets to every Tom-noddy who may arrive from England? I cannot answer those questions, satisfactorily to myself; and no more, I venture to think, can you. But, observe this, that the matter, as it now stands, is of a nature exceedingly grave. If the Archduke Constantine held no conversation of the kind alleged with Sir Robert Peel (and we have his express denial of it), in what terms shall we characterise the assertion made by the latter for the evident purpose of blasting the reputation of one of the oldest and most distinguished of the British admirals? If Constantine did hold such a conversation with Peel, then the latter has obviously violated the conventional courtesies of society, by publishing what must, in any point of view, be held as a private communication. Lord Palmerston, however jauntily he may ride the public horse, would do well to pay some attention to its shoeing. Whatever may be the indiscretions of such men as Sir Charles Napier—however imprudent they may be in their squabbles with the Admiralty or other boards—they have at all events won, by honourable and dangerous service, that hold on the nation’s heart, that no man of generous feeling, whatever his party may be, will allow them to be wantonly assailed by an understrapper or buffoon, whose continuance in office must be an additional disgrace to the Ministry, who were imprudent enough to elevate him to a position for which he was obviously and notoriously unfit.

Let me now, for a few moments, direct your attention to another subject. It is one of considerable importance and vast interest to the public, who during the last twelve months have expended large sums in the fortification of their dwelling-houses, to the no small delight and emolument of the ironmongers and locksmiths. The old adage, that an Englishman’s house is his castle, which at first was a mere figure of speech, has now been actually realised. What with bolts, bars, chains, screws, iron-shutters, and alarum-bells, our private mansions are as well secured as Newgate; and the burglars, in their more recent attempts, have been reduced to the unartistic device of breaking through side-walls, in order to arrive at the plate-chests. But this state of comparative security has been dearly purchased. Many old ladies, of nervous temperament, have expired in paroxysms of terror, caused by the slamming of doors and the creaking of hinges during the silent watches of the night. I have heard of one timorous gentleman, who coughed himself to death in consequence of a cold contracted from incarceration in the coal-cellar, to which donjon-keep he had fled, alarmed by a sound which resembled the rasping of a file. Innumerable Blowsalindas threatened to abandon their places, unless a policeman was allowed to sleep in the house; and in one unfortunate instance, a brace of glaziers, who had gone early to work, and were engaged in cleaning the windows, were shot right and left by an eccentric colonel of militia. At length, by the aid of Chubb and his coadjutors, who must have realised colossal fortunes during the panic, men are tolerably safe within doors, and can retire to roost without the dread of being wakened about three in the morning by the gleam of a lantern carried by a gentleman who has modestly veiled his countenance with crape, but who, being armed with a carving-knife, needs not to employ many arguments before you make surrender of your movables. But alas! the same degree of security does not exist without. If you tarry at your club until the witching hour of midnight, in the enjoyment of the conversation of some facetious friend, or seduced by the charms of roasted oysters, the chances are that, on your return homeward, you are garotted before you reach the second lamppost. It is not pleasant to feel your weazand contract under the gripe of one brawny ruffian, while a second trips up your heels, bringing your occiput into violent contact with the pavement or the kerbstone: it is not profitable to lose your watch, your note-case, and your purse, in so ignominious a manner; and it is decidedly disagreeable to be compelled to walk about for the next fortnight with your eyes protruding from your head like those of a lobster, and an expression of countenance which would infallibly lead a stranger to conjecture that you had been ordered for execution, and been cut down, in consequence of the arrival of a reprieve, before the vital spark was extinguished. Many an excellent gentleman and pious Christian has recently walked the streets, after sunset, under the influence of those terrors so well described by Coleridge, who, I think, must have been garotted in his day;—

“Like one, that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.”

Under such circumstances, fear becomes a positive duty; and the apparition of an intoxicated apprentice staggering suddenly from a common stair, is enough to make Julius Cæsar betake himself to his heels. I have seen a good deal of foreign cities, the repute of which is by no means creditable, but I give you my word that I would rather thread the streets of Lisbon or Pera, after nightfall, than perambulate those of an English town, under the operation of the system now pursued with regard to the disposal of criminals.

What are you all about, that you submit to lead a life of perpetual fear, suspicion, and bondage? Do you not see that the remedy is in your own hands, and that it is a very plain one? Can anything be more absurd than the assemblage of meetings for the purpose of taking into consideration schemes of education, projects for the diffusion of knowledge, further reforms in the constitution, or even the readjustment of the taxes, before demanding from the Government that they shall fulfil their first duty, which is that of adequately protecting the lives and property of the lieges? Have you not had warning enough of the hideous results of that system of ticket-of-leave which no one but an absolute idiot can now have the temerity to defend? Why, the papers daily teem with accounts of murders, garottings, housebreakings, and the like, to an extent which never, in my remembrance at least, was paralleled; and yet certain wiseacres, who hold the office of Ministers, and style themselves statesmen, very calmly tell you that the system of tickets of leave has not yet had a fair trial! And so you, Ebony, and your friends, and all the honest men throughout the country, are to be exposed to the imminent danger of being throttled, robbed, or murdered, in order that a parcel of obstinate prigs in high places may have an opportunity of solving what they are pleased to call an interesting social problem! I should like to know what is the use of a Government if it does not provide for the safety of the subject in life, limb, and property. Has it indeed come to this, that an army of desperate convicts is to be let loose upon the respectable classes of society, for the purpose of ascertaining whether they have got rid of their old tendencies towards crime, the experiment being measured by the number of throats which are cut, of houses which are broken into and pilfered, of ladies and gentlemen who are burked in the streets, and of tradesmen’s tills that are plundered, compared with the number of the convicts who are released from prison contrary to the sentence which they have received? Had Swift introduced such a picture of pragmatic imbecility in his voyage of Gulliver to Laputa, men would have laughed at it as an utterly impossible extravaganza. It would at once have been said that in no civilised country in the world—nay, for that matter, in no country however barbarous, for the sense of justice is instinctive to man—would the executive be allowed, except in extraordinary and isolated cases, to interfere with the judgments pronounced by its judicial tribunals. Yet, what is the fact? Our judges are practically told that these sentences are of no avail. Having heard the case with all its concomitant circumstances, which almost invariably indicates the real character, habits, and tendencies of the accused—and having received the verdict of the jury—they apportion the punishment, not for vengeance, but, according to the righteous and humane spirit of our laws, for the safety of society, and for a solemn warning to others. Now, I say—and I am ready to maintain the argument against all the doctrinaires in Christendom and Heathenesse—that if you allow any functionary or official, who knows nothing of the circumstances elicited at the trial, to alter arbitrarily the sentence pronounced by a competent court, a fatal, or, at all events, a very serious blow will be struck at the best interests of society. Look, for example, at the procedure in cases where a capital sentence has been pronounced. The Secretary of State, to whom memorials praying for a mitigation of punishment are sent, never ventures, on his own responsibility, to advise the Sovereign to exercise her prerogative of mercy, without communication with the judge before whom the case was tried. This practice is laudable and necessary—laudable, because it gives the judge an opportunity of stating the existence of any mitigating circumstances—and necessary, because otherwise the dignity and authority of a Supreme Court could not possibly be maintained. Can any reason be stated why the like precautions should be dispensed with in cases where the punishment falls short of a capital one? We have seen, of late years, a considerable relaxation in our criminal code; inasmuch as many offences which were formerly capital, are now visited by arbitrary punishment only. There can be no doubt whatever that the change was righteous, humane, and such as befitted a Christian nation, although late occurrences give some colour to the opinion that the relaxation was carried too far. But, be that as it may, it is difficult to see—and I, for one, fairly confess that I am utterly unable to see—why relaxation of statutory penalties, and substitution of minor punishments, should carry along with it the right of disregarding the sentence which the court has actually pronounced. Twenty years ago a man would have been hanged for commission of an offence, for which, now, he receives the sentence of seven, ten, or fourteen years’ transportation. Is the relaxation of the law any reason for dispensing with the precautions which were previously used before a criminal was admitted to mercy? In the old times, a man was executed, and there was an end of him. Society had no more to fear, at least from his particular atrocity or depredations. But, under the new system, the sentences of the judges, pronounced after a deliberate investigation of the case, are virtually handed over for the revisal of the chaplains of jails and penitentiaries, who are utterly ignorant of the facts which were elicited at the trial. It is a gross mistake to suppose that ignorance, or want of education, are the most fertile causes of crime. Petty larcenies and wretched thefts—picking of pockets, and abstraction of articles exhibited at shop-doors—are undoubtedly the province of the children of the destitute, and for them reformatory and ragged schools are imperatively required. But crime, in the higher branches, is a regular profession, to attain eminence in which a man must be as dexterous, wary, provident, and careful, as if he were engaged in any lawful business. Nay, he must be more so; because, being constantly liable to detection, he is compelled to strain his ingenuity to the utmost, and so calculate every step which he makes towards the attainment of his object. It is a mere farce, an utter delusion, and a perfect abandonment of common sense, to expect that such men will ever return to the paths of common industry, or be contented with humble gains. They have an absolute pride in the exercise of their profession; and they are not haunted by remorse in consequence of what they do. Their moral perceptions are utterly blunted; and that being the case, it is in vain to hope that they will be converted from the error of their ways by occasional visits from the chaplain of the jail. Very rarely indeed does a felon of this stamp make any progress during the period of his incarceration towards amendment. Orderly conduct and respectful demeanour are the necessary results of strict prison discipline; but they are not by any means to be taken as symptoms of actual improvement. Nay, the convict has a direct inducement to assume a decorous, respectful, and even repentant manner, because he hopes, through the recommendation of the chaplain, to obtain a remission of his punishment. It is no disrespect to the clergy to say that, as a body, they are very liable to imposition. A clever scoundrel, if he addresses himself artfully to the task, can hardly fail to make a favourable impression. He can soon acquire the tricks of interlarding his discourse with Scriptural terms and phraseology, of counterfeiting humility, and of shamming penitence. Now, to let loose upon society men of this stamp, under tickets of leave, is simply to encourage further violence and depredation. I do not say that every convicted sinner must necessarily be thereafter a felon; but I do say that, after more than one conviction, his case is, humanly speaking, hopeless. In nine cases out of ten, such men emerge from the jails and penitentiaries to steal, rob, and swindle as before.

Philo-convicts of the maudlin school—for I will not call them philanthropists—say that the frequent relapse into crime of liberated prisoners, is very much owing to the fact, that no one, who is acquainted with their previous history, will give them employment. I grant that. If the gods had provided me with sufficient income to keep a butler, I certainly should be chary of engaging an individual who had just completed his sentence for embezzling the silver spoons of his previous master. If I were a tradesman, I should decline taking the extra trouble of watching the motions of a young Barnwell, who was recommended to me by the fact that he had robbed his employer’s till. And I further tell the philo-convicts, that, in utterly and entirely refusing to trust a convict, I am acting not only prudentially to myself, but wisely as regards society; because so long as an honest man remains without employment, it is bad policy and worse morals to give the preference to an attainted thief. To act otherwise, is practically to deny that good character is to be considered as an element in the selection of servants—a position which may suit the present Ministry, seeing that some of their appointments have been made altogether irrespective of character, but which never will be adopted by the great body of the public. I accept, however, the fact that ticket-of-leave men and other convicts have little chance in this country of obtaining employment through the usual channels, even though they should be sincere in their wishes to return to the ways of industry. Well, then, what is the obvious deduction from this fact? Is it not that the Government have been guilty of a grievous dereliction of duty in commuting the sentences of prisoners, and letting them loose upon society before the appointed time? It is all very well for officials to wring their hands; to tell us that the colonies will no longer receive prisoners from the mother country; that transportation, at least in the old directions, is now impossible; and finally, to fix a stupid stare upon the public, and ask it what is to be done with the convicts? The public ought sternly to reply that the disposal of the convicts is a matter which the Government must look to; but that at all hazards life and property must be protected. I deny in toto that you, or I, or any of us, are bound to tell the Government what they ought to do in regard to the disposal of convicts. I say it is monstrous and intolerable that society should be left in a state of siege and panic, exposed to violence and outrage which seems to be every day on the increase, until the Government shall determine whether any remote colonial possession is available for purposes of transportation, or whether convicts ought not to be employed in public works within the boundaries of Great Britain. I do not underrate the importance of these questions. I do hope that the Government will very soon make up their minds to adopt some one intelligible and consistent course. But I protest against these questions being mixed up with that of the system of ticket-of-leave, which has nothing whatever to do with them. It may be a point of consideration for the custodiers of a menagerie, or travelling collection of wild beasts, whether it would be most advisable for them to proceed north, or south, or east, or west, or otherwise to sell and disperse their animals among the different zoological gardens; but what right have they, pending their resolution, to open the doors of the cages, and let wolves, tigers, and hyenas loose on the neighbouring fields? And yet that is precisely what our Government has done with the wild animals of which it is the custodier! Their wicked and dangerous tendencies were known and established. They were tried for outrages on society, convicted, and sentenced to restraint; and yet the Government, because a difficulty has arisen abroad, consider themselves entitled to disregard the sentences of the law, and again to deluge society with experienced adepts in crime. One of the soundest arguments for the old system of transportation was that, by removing hardened, expert, and practised criminals from the country, there was so much the better chance of reforming those who were merely beginners in crime. All that is now forgotten. Scholars in larceny will never lack teachers so long as the present infamous system is persevered in; young cracksmen will find leaders to organise them into regular gangs, and the function of the reformatories will be over.

I suspect that very few of the general public are aware of the extent to which the system of ticket-of-leave has been carried. Blue-books are by no means lively reading; and yet, without consulting the blue-books, it is impossible adequately to understand the precise situation in which we are placed with regard to convicts at large. Let me therefore note down a few facts extracted from the evidence given before the Select Committee on Transportation last year.

Mr Waddington, permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, tells us that, up to March 1856, there were no less than FIVE THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-TWO convicts, who had been sentenced to transportation, discharged upon the public under licenses or tickets of leave! How many more have since received their tickets I cannot say, but judging from the numbers of former years, there cannot now be fewer than from seven to eight thousand criminals, equivalent to a respectable army, who are left to forage for themselves. Mr Waddington says very jauntily,—“The Committee are aware, no doubt, that these persons under sentence of transportation are persons who had been, most of them, two or three times convicted that we know of; they may have been convicted oftener than that, but they are almost all of them old offenders, and therefore it was highly probable that, upon being thrown back into society, a great portion of them would misconduct themselves in a very serious manner.” This is, indeed, plain-speaking with a vengeance! Here you have an admission that the Government expected, as the result of their experiment, that a large portion of the ticket-of-leave men would return to their old courses; that is, would steal, rob, assault, and garotte as before! At whose expense, pray? At the expense of that Issachar the public, who having borne the burden of their previous offences, were next to bear that of their offences in time to come! Here is a beautiful conflict between the law and the executive. “John Noakes,” says the judge at the trial, “you have been convicted no less than six times in competent courts. You are a hardened, brutal, and irreclaimable criminal. You cannot be allowed, for the interests of society, to remain longer in the country. Therefore your sentence is, that you be transported for the period of fourteen years.” Noakes leaves the dock, after having delivered himself of an irreverent remark touching the judge’s eyes, and a facetious reference to being herring-ponded. But there is yet a door of exit. “John Noakes,” says the beautifully paternal government with which we are blessed, “you have doubtless been convicted six times already, but we are willing to think that, on the whole, you are a harmless and rather well-intentioned fellow. It is true that you have been sentenced to transportation for fourteen years; but at present there is some difficulty in finding quarters for you abroad, and it would be both inconvenient and expensive to keep you in custody at home. So, upon the whole, we think the best course is to set you at liberty. Here is a ticket of leave for you, which you will please accept, on the understanding that, if you are again convicted, that leave will be revoked. You may not perhaps be able to find employment, but that is your look-out—so good-by to you.” John Noakes quits the prison, repairs straightway to the “Jack Sheppard” public-house, where he falls in with some of his old associates, plans a new burglary; and on the following night the premises of a respectable jeweller are broken into, and property abstracted to the value of a couple of thousand pounds!

Mr Waddington, however, thinks that the effect of the system “has been at least as good as any reasonable person could have anticipated, considering the nature of the offenders who have been discharged;” and he states it to be a fact that out of 5152 liberated on ticket-of-leave, only 447 have been reported for misconduct; that is, have found their way back to prison. Now, I must confess that I can see in this no ground for congratulation, even supposing that no more than 447 have again betaken themselves to unlawful courses within the short space of two and a half years. But we have no right whatever to suppose anything of the kind. We learn from other evidence that the ticket-of-leave men are scattered all over the kingdom, without any mark or method by which the police can recognise them; consequently a much larger number than the above may have been apprehended and tried for new offences without the knowledge of the authorities. “I think,” says Sir Archibald Alison, who, as sheriff and criminal judge of Lanarkshire, can speak on this subject with authority—“I think that the number of ticket-of-leave men who are proved in courts to be concerned in crime, bears a very small proportion to the number of those who do commit crime; for this reason, that they are not known.” In the appendix to the second report there are some valuable documents touching the habits of ticket-of-leave men. Here for example is an abridgment of the report of the Superintendent of the F. Division of the London police, on the habits of the liberated criminals in his district.

“R. W.: Constant associate of thieves; no lawful occupation; once convicted of assault. E. M.: Does not follow any occupation, and is well suspected of being a thief. J. W.: Immediately on his return, cohabited with a notorious thief and prostitute, and does not follow any awful occupation at present. C. G.: Does not follow any lawful calling. Since his return has been the constant and daily associate of thieves and other notoriously bad characters. J. C.: Keeper of a shop for the sale of second-hand clothes, and has frequently been seen in the company of convicted thieves. J. G.: Lodges with a convicted thief, and is supposed to gain his living by hawking obscene cards, &c. T. C.: Employed as a messenger or porter, and appears to be gaining an honest living. T. N.: Was liberated on ticket of leave about two months since; at present does not follow any employment.”

So that out of eight ticket-of-leave men resident in this Division, and known to the police, six are supposed to have fallen back on their old courses; one is doing well; and one has been liberated for so short a time that, according to the Superintendent, “no decided opinion can be expressed relative to him.”

Mr Hill, Q. C., Recorder of Birmingham, caused a special report to be prepared by the police of that town relative to the habits of the ticket-of-leave men known to reside there, their number being nineteen. The report bears that of these, eight were considered good, nine bad, and two doubtful.

The impression left upon my mind by the perusal of these and similar returns, is that at least one half of the liberated convicts are at this moment preying upon the public. I again quote from Alison’s evidence: “I should say, from what I have seen, that the ticket-of-leave system has had the very worst possible effects in Scotland; that it has sent back the most talented, the most dangerous, and the most formidable class of depredators; and that they are either concerned in the greatest crimes themselves, or that they lead others to the commission of the same description of crimes.”

If the good folks of Great Britain choose to submit to this monstrous wrong and most iniquitous system—if they are willing without complaint or murmur to see the dangerous classes, the convicted felons, let loose among them, to resume the functions of the pick-lock and the crowbar, the garotte and the bludgeon, and to destroy all chance of the success of reformatory schools—it is no business of mine. No burglar will ever think of breaking into a lighthouse, and I feel quite assured that what little property I have is in perfect safety. But if they, on the contrary, are convinced that the whole system is a rank imposture and delusion, and that they, the people of character and property, are left at the mercy of a rapidly increasing army of convicted scoundrels, in order to be experimented on for the gratification of a few pragmatic doctrinaires, let them make their voices audible, and the Ministry must at once succumb. Never, within my recollection, has there been so fitting an object for agitation, never so imperative a reason for it. And I do hope that they will not allow themselves to be humbugged or bamboozled by any difficulties, real or pretended, about the disposal of the convicts. I am quite aware that there are difficulties; but with these it is the express duty of the Government to grapple.

Now, Ebony, I have done for the present. You see this has been but a rambling kind of letter, but I hope in future to be more concise. Send me as much periodical literature as you can, and a few boxes of cigars, if you have any to spare, as a token of your continued friendship. I do not think it prudent, under existing circumstances, to adhibit my real name and address, as that might awaken, in certain bosoms, expectations which never can be realised; so I must even find a sobriquet connected with my present humble though highly useful and honourable situation. “Pharos” is too Egyptian for my taste—“Hesperus” too maudlin. “Lucifer” is a title already appropriated, to which I desire to lay no manner of claim; and therefore I shall modestly subscribe myself, your sincere well-wisher,

PHOSPHORUS.

Pictarnie Lighthouse,

North Britain.

LORD ST LEONARDS.[8]

Some little time ago might have been seen in the corner of a weekly legal periodical the following brief intimation: “Early in January 1857 will be published the Thirteenth Edition of Sugden’s Law of Vendors and Purchasers of Estates, with important additions. This Edition will contain between eleven and twelve hundred cases, in addition to those in the last Edition.... The Author has bestowed great pains on this Edition.” The book now lies before us; and in the preface we find this observation: “Every case cited I have perused in the original Report, and every line of the book has been written by myself,” that book being a royal octavo volume of 720 closely-printed pages, and those cases—as we vouch, after curiously counting the table of cases—amounting to upwards of four thousand six hundred! And who, it may be asked, is this very laborious author? No other than Lord St Leonards, so lately Lord High Chancellor, now in his seventy-fifth year, yet having the inclination and the power, mental and physical, thus to occupy the intervals of leisure occurring in the discharge of his judicial and legislative duties as a member of the House of Lords! The career of such a man we commend to the studious attention of some future historian of the Lives of the Lord Chancellors; and in the mean time shall supply him with some authentic materials, collected in the course of careful inquiry, and personal observation.

We believe that England never before saw, living at once, three such remarkable subjects for the portraiture of some future Lord Campbell, as the three ex-Chancellors now adorning the House of Lords—Lords Lyndhurst, Brougham, and St Leonards,—Lord Campbell himself being a distinguished member of that House, for a brief space Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and now the learned and upright Lord Chief Justice of England. At some future time we may ourselves attempt sketches of Lords Lyndhurst, Brougham, and Campbell; but our present concern is with that one of the aforesaid three ex-Chancellors whose name stands at the head of this article. Without attributing to him the attractive and dazzling characteristics of Lords Lyndhurst and Brougham as orators and statesmen—the latter, too, a prodigy of versatility and power—we shall, by a plain narrative of facts, establish the pretensions of Lord St Leonards to be regarded as a great lawyer, whose name will be ranked with those of Lord Hardwicke and Lord Eldon; while, in several respects, his career is more remarkable and more instructive than that of either. The race of great lawyers in England is but too evidently dying out. Perhaps we see the last of them in Lord St Leonards, who may be said to have exhibited as great legal, as the late Duke of Wellington military, genius. And the former has this signal characteristic, that throughout the whole of his long, arduous, and distinguished career as advocate, judge, and legislator, he has never intermitted the labours of legal authorship; but brought forth works of practical and profound erudition, contributing to develop law as a science, aiding the studies, and facilitating the practice and administration of that law, by every member of the profession. Under this fourfold aspect, therefore, of author, advocate, judge, and legislator, we propose to exhibit a sketch of the life and labours of Lord St Leonards,—tracing him from his first book and his first brief, to his last edition of that first book; to his last brief; to his last judgment as Lord High Chancellor; and the most recent of a long series of Acts of Parliament, of the highest practical importance, contributed by him to the Statute-book.

Edward Burtenshaw Sugden was born in the year 1781; and having duly entered himself a student of Lincoln’s Inn, such was the use he had made of his time, and such his marvellous aptitude for the acquisition of legal knowledge—for which, indeed, his intellect may be said to have exhibited a sort of elective affinity—that before he had reached his twenty-second year, as he himself has left on record,[9] he had written his Vendors and Purchasers of Estates—which was published in February 1805,—i. e. in his twenty-fourth year! It is an octavo volume of 461 pages. We have seen a copy of it bearing the date 1805; and no person, competent to judge, can read its terse and thoroughly practical exposition of the leading principles applicable to so difficult and unwieldy a subject, without wondering how the youthful author could have acquired the requisite knowledge and facility in using it. He was a pupil of the late eminent conveyancer, Mr Duval, but we are not aware at what age he entered the chambers of that gentleman. Let us now, however, leap over a good half-century, and look for a moment at the account of this early performance, given by its author on the 10th of this present January 1857, in the highly interesting preface to the edition now under consideration:—

“After the lapse of half a century since the first publication of this work, I am about to send forth a thirteenth edition of it. Determined at my outset in life to write a book, I was delighted when I hit upon the subject now before the reader—the Law of Vendors and Purchasers. The title promised well; and many portions of the law had not previously been embodied in any treatise. Modern law-treatises were indeed few at that period. When this work was announced for publication, nearly the universal opinion was that it would be a failure, as the subjects to be considered were too multifarious for one treatise. Nothing dismayed, I laboured diligently; and with the aid of Lincoln’s Inn library, in which a considerable portion of the book was written—for my own shelves were but scantily furnished—I at length finished the work in its original shape. My courage then failed me. The expense of publication was certain, and success I thought more than doubtful; and it was not without some difficulty that I could be persuaded to refrain from committing the manuscript to the flames, and to join with a bookseller in incurring the risk of publishing it at half profit and loss, as it is termed. As soon as the book was printed, another bookseller bought my interest in the edition, and thus relieved me from my obligations. The amount I received as the price of the edition was small, but I have never since received any sum with anything approaching to the same satisfaction. The book was certainly the foundation of my early success in life.”

Who does not envy the veteran (not lagging lazily on the stage) this retrospect, and thank him for a glimpse of his autobiography? He proceeds to tell us that this first edition was sold “at once;” that a greatly enlarged one was published in June 1806—both before he was called to the bar; the third in a year afterwards, in 1808; the fourth in 1813; and five new and very large editions at regular intervals of four years, till 1834;—“all these six appearing,” he continues, “while I was in full practice at the bar, and could ill afford the time required to re-edit the work.” On returning from Ireland, in 1835, after his first Chancellorship, “I had,” he says, “for the first time in my professional life, full leisure, and revised the whole work with great care;” and published a tenth edition, in three volumes royal 8vo, in 1839. “While yet a second time in office in Ireland” (as to which we shall have by-and-by to say much that is interesting), “I prepared and published, on the 1st May 1846” (that is, while holding the Irish Seals), “the eleventh edition, compressed into two volumes.” A twelfth, in a greatly compressed form, in one small octavo volume, a work of very great labour, appeared in June 1851,—every portion, including even index and table of cases, being his own exclusive personal handiwork. Six months afterwards he became Lord Chancellor of Great Britain; and now, at the opening of the new year, 1857, we have, as a sort of parting gift, of infinite value to the profession of the law, this thirteenth edition, “the last,” he says, though he is in full health and vigour, “that I can expect to publish.... To restore the work to its original shape as a treatise, and at the same time preserve its character as a concise and practical view of the subject” (the form which the twelfth edition had assumed), “I have spared neither time nor labour.” Those only can judge of the labour and time required for such a task, who are in the habit of perusing all the voluminous reports of our many courts. The twelfth edition contained some five hundred cases not quoted in the eleventh; and upwards of twelve hundred cases are included in this thirteenth which were not in the twelfth. “This collection of cases is the fruit of upwards of half a century of research and labour;—every case” (as we have seen), “I have perused in the original report, and every line of the book has been written by myself. I doubt not that there are errors which have escaped me, but I have endeavoured to leave behind me this, my first work, in a shape in some sense worthy of the acceptance of the members of the profession to which I have the honour to belong; and I know, by a long experience, that I may safely rely on their indulgence.” Such is the first glimpse we obtain of Edward Sugden, starting on his career as an author,—during half a century’s overwhelming labour and anxiety as a Chancery counsel, as an active member of the House of Commons, and as thrice a Lord Chancellor. Blackwood’s Magazine is not the fitting expositor, in detail, of this great law-treatise, stamped by the unanimous and uninterrupted approbation, for half a century, of the whole legal profession, of every rank—by judges, counsel, and solicitors, alike in courts of law and equity. We think there must at this moment be extant some thirty or forty thousand copies of the various editions of the “Vendors and Purchasers;” and we entertain little doubt that, as soon as this last is seen, no member of the profession, who can afford to procure it, will be long without doing so. To the general reader we may intimate that this work is of an intensely practical character; and the art of condensation which it manifests can go no further. Its sweep is immense. The gifted author exhibits the power of grasping the whole subject, however extensive and complicated, and yet applying accurate—and the latest—legal knowledge to the minutest exigency,—from the terse, clear, cautious, and yet decisive enumeration of the profoundest principles of equity, down to a question of costs,—in all the variety of subdivisions of that somewhat expensive luxury,—whether as “costs” simpliciter, or as “costs, charges, and expenses!” Probably no book of the kind has ever stood on a lawyer’s shelves, or was constantly in hand, in which so few errors have been detected; while able and experienced lawyers could point to great numbers of opinions and doubts from time to time expressed by the author, which have afterwards been sanctioned by judicial decision, and are always entertained and canvassed with the utmost respect—the respect due to one bringing the results of vast practical and scientific knowledge and experience to bear upon the ordinary exigencies of litigation. It has facilitated the labour, and alleviated the anxieties and responsibilities of tens of thousands of practitioners during half a century:[10] and those of 1857,—students as well as practitioners—now see a new edition, thoroughly remodelling the work, and adapting it to existing exigencies with scrupulously conscientious personal care and labour, by an author who so lately administered justice as Lord High Chancellor, to the admiration of all.

Shortly after the original appearance of this work, its author, then seeking practice as a conveyancer under the bar, received a Case for his opinion, in consequence of a solicitor’s having cancelled the work. Mr Sugden’s opinion differed from that which, though given by an eminent counsel, had dissatisfied his client, and proved to be correct. In a short time he found himself in large and rapidly increasing business. Two years after the appearance of his book, namely in 1807, he was called to the bar; and the first trace of him in the reports is to be found in the 14th volume of Vesey Junior’s Reports of Cases in Chancery, p. 302, on the 18th March in that year, in the case of Browne v. Like, which was, in fact, the first case he ever argued, and before that very eminent judge, Sir William Grant, then Master of the Rolls. Mr Sugden’s senior on that occasion was Sir Samuel Romilly, who left him to open the case. He has since said, that when he first rose, at the corner of the back bench in that dusky little court, his knees shook under him; but if this were so, he disguised his nervousness, and spoke, as we have heard, with apparent calmness and self-possession,—so effectually arguing the first of the two points in dispute, and the main one, that, on his proceeding to the second, to his surprise, Mr Richards, subsequently Chief Baron of the Exchequer, who led for the defendant, turned round and told him that they should abandon that point; thereby so encouraging the young counsel, that, in a more lively and confident frame of mind, he proceeded to his second point. His opponents were unable to answer his lucid argument; and after a few words in reply from Sir Samuel Romilly, the court decided in favour of the plaintiff, and thus enjoyed Mr Sugden his prædulce decus primo certamine! This his first case was a small affair in point of the property involved, but has its special interest, as far as he is concerned—not only as occasioning his maiden effort, but because it affected a branch of the law which, not long afterwards, fell under his vigorous assault, as most vexatious and oppressive—the enrolling of Annuities. The facts were shortly these: An uncle had bequeathed to his niece, for her sole and separate use, a life interest in the dividends on a small sum in the Funds, vested in trustees for that purpose. Soon afterwards she married, and, with her husband’s concurrence, bonâ fide sold to Mr Sugden’s client, for £140, twenty pounds a-year of the aforesaid dividends; but no memorial of the deed of sale was enrolled according to the Act then in force, and since repealed. The two questions were, whether the lady had power to sell these dividends? and whether the transaction was a “sale, out and out,” or the grant of an annuity? in the former case requiring no enrolment. The first point was given up,[11] and the second decided against the defendant. Mr Sugden’s second case in court, as far as we have been able to trace him, was the well-known one of Sloane v. Cadogan, in the Rolls Court in the year 1808. His own outline of his elaborate argument is to be found in the appendix to the “Vendors and Purchasers.” Those clients of Mr Sugden who are still living, tell of the peace of mind which ensued their securing his services as their conveyancer; so prompt, correct, decisive, was he as an adviser, and, as a draftsman, neat, concise, and elegant. In his case, confidence was not a plant of slow growth. His practice grew apace in chambers, and he began more and more frequently to appear, not only in courts of equity, but in those of common law, to argue questions connected with conveyancing, and the law of real property: quickly conciliating the respect of opponents, and of the bench, by his exact and extensive knowledge, and masterly use of it. Great as was the pressure of his chamber practice, and constantly increasing as were his appearances in court, Mr Sugden yet found time to prepare two new editions of his “Vendors and Purchasers,” as we have seen, in the years 1806 and 1808, that of the latter year in a far more systematic form than any of the former had exhibited, being, as he now tells us, “the first divided into sections, with the placita numbered.” And as if even all this were not sufficient, the selfsame year 1808 saw another important work of his, of a much higher order than his former one, as of a more abstruse and scientific character—his Treatise on POWERS. This elaborate and systematic work, which we regard as eminently characteristic of its author’s legal genius, at once elevated him—now in his twenty-seventh year—to a conspicuous position in the foremost rank of living lawyers. It has ever since continued a text-book of the highest repute—we might almost say, though in its authors lifetime, of authority—and has passed through seven large editions, every one prepared by the indefatigable author, who, in his preface to the first edition, modestly pleaded, “as an excuse for any inaccuracies in it, the necessity of devoting his time to other labours, from which moments were snatched for this performance.” He is here speaking of his labours as a conveyancer in full practice, whose toils are severe and unremitting; requiring a close exclusive attention, if he would not run the risk of making shipwreck of his reputation by perilling, or actually sacrificing, the important interests confided to his skilled experience. To such a master of his art as Mr Sugden, these toils would be lightened as far as their troublesome nature admitted. The Practical Treatise on POWERS, we regard as one of the most remarkable performances on record in the literature of the law, especially as that of a conveyancer comparatively so youthful. The attempt to give a mere general reader a fair notion of what the lawyer means by “powers,” would be about as hopeful as to explain to a young lady the doctrine of differential calculus. To form an idea of this kind of “Power,” he must be apprised of the nature of “Use,” of a “Trust,” of the old common law, and after a great statute. Blackstone, that exquisitely elegant expositor of everything susceptible of exposition, declared it “impracticable,” in the plan of his Commentaries, “to pursue the doctrine of Uses through all the refinements and niceties which the ingenuity of times abounding in subtle distinctions, deduced from this child of the imagination;” “a notion transplanted,” he elsewhere tells us, “into England from the civil law about the close of the reign of Edward III., by means of the foreign ecclesiastics, who introduced it to evade the statutes of mortmain.” Would our non-legal readers set out with us, if we were so disposed, to follow this ignis fatuus? Doubtless they would be as unwilling to follow as we to lead. Suffice it to say, therefore, that the introduction of Uses and Trusts produced a great revolution in the transfer and modification of landed property, forming “a law whereupon,” says Lord Bacon, in his Reading on the Statute of Uses, “the inheritances of this realm are tossed at this day, like a ship upon the sea, in such sort that it is hard to say which bark will sink, and which will get to the haven.” It has, however, constituted the main-spring of the delicate and complex machinery of the conveyancer—to whose craft, directly or indirectly, fortunate reader! you are indebted at this moment for the safe enjoyment of your estates, however small, however large. Yet it would be interesting to an historical and reflecting reader, to contemplate the great wrestling-match between the Legislature and the astute Chancery lawyers of the day—how each in his turn defeated the other, and how it ultimately contributes to the present division between our systems of law and equity. “Uses” and “Powers” are the means by which our existing method of “settling” real estates is effected and maintained, enabling, as they do, the possessor to chalk out the future enjoyment of it in as many contingencies, and for as long a period, as the policy of the law admits; and no little of the intricacy of the existing system is due to the exacting ambition or far-seeing beneficence of owners of property. Now, “Sugden on Powers” forms a sine quâ non of the practical conveyancer; and if the student, after acquiring a knowledge of the doctrine of Uses, of which that of Powers, says St Leonards, is only a branch that has greatly surpassed in growth its parent stock, he will find that three-fourths of his difficulties have vanished. We heard some years ago, and now know it as a fact, that the late Sir Robert Peel once laughingly told Sir Edward Sugden, at dinner, that he had, from what he had heard of the difficulty of this book, regarded it as a sort of legal Euclid; and having ascertained, he said, that the third section of the first chapter was the Pons Asinorum of lawyers, he had resolved to master it! So having sat down for that purpose, he succeeded, as he averred, and had found out all about borrescimus referentes!—“Scintilla juris.” The aforesaid section has the inviting heading—“Of Scintilla Juris,” a matter which has exercised, harassed, and well-nigh split the heads of a whole army of judges—of Lord Bacon even, who seems to speak of it, Sir Edward tells us, in a contemptuous tone. Sir Edward himself characterises it as a fiction, invented by perverse astuteness to escape a difficulty which itself only had created. When a man had indicated the future enjoyment of his property, in certain specified contingencies, the antique conveyancer, putting on a pair of huge magnifying-glasses, fancied he detected in that man, who himself imagined that he had exhausted himself of all connection with the property, a lambent spark of interest—a mere metaphysical entity—a momentary seisin, adequate to “feed the use.”

“Over this invention,” says a masterly living writer on conveyancing (Mr Hayes), “the old judges cast the veil of Latinity, and prudently withdrew it, under the learned appellation of ‘Scintilla juris,’ from profane examination! Westminster Hall resounded with the debate. The speeches of the eleven judges, who delivered their opinions seriatim, occupied six days! The Lord Chief-Justice Popham declared that not to cherish the scintilla juris would be to cast the whole commonwealth into a sea of troubles, and endanger it with utter confusion and drowning.” “The commonwealth,” adds the sarcastic writer, himself a first-rate conveyancer, “had little to fear, but common sense was in imminent danger of perishing between the conflicting elements of fire and water.”

The “Scintilla” has learned advocates and opponents to this hour; among the latter being Lord Bacon, Lord St Leonards, Mr Fearne, Mr Butler, Mr Preston, and Mr Hayes—a sort of legal galaxy. Still, however, to change the figure, the indurated stump of this doctrine retains a sort of tenacious vitality in the prolific subsoil of legal ingenuity. While thus dismissing a matter, savouring, as the unlearned and irreverent reader might presumptuously imagine, somewhat of the mighty dispute between Tweedledum v. Tweedledee—let us intimate that the “Treatise on Powers” is divided into nineteen elaborate chapters, each distributed into sections, so disposed, and so treating an extensive and complicated subject, as to be almost equally adapted for elementary and practical purposes. It is a masterly combination of legal subtlety with the strongest common-sense, applied with the utmost exactness to practical exigencies—not, as he himself intimated, perversely suggesting doubts, but supplying solutions for real difficulties. Of these solutions it were easy to cite many instances of judicial adoption, such as will readily occur to any well-informed professional reader.

“The author regrets,” he says, in the preface to the sixth edition (1836), “that he has upon so many points differed from persons for whom he entertains unfeigned respect, but he has rather considered the principle of the rule than the weight due to the authority by whom it was pronounced; and his own erroneous impressions may readily be corrected; for it is but in few instances that he has given an opinion without stating the reasons upon which it is grounded.”

And in another part of the same preface to this, his favourite performance, occurs the following interesting passage:—

“We have many admirable treatises; but, for the most part, our legal authors want either experience or time, and it ever must be so; for if a man do not write on law while he is young, he probably never will; and if at an advanced period he revise his early productions, with the advantage of reputation and increased experience, time, without which nothing important can be accomplished upon legal subjects, is no longer at his command. And, besides, a counsel in actual practice can seldom write freely upon decisions in which he has been engaged. If he find fault with a decision against him, it may be imputed to partial or perverted views; and if he disapprove of any in which he has been successful, the criticism from such a quarter might afford the groundwork of an appeal.”

The third edition (1821) was dedicated, by permission, to Lord Chancellor Eldon, than whom no one entertained a greater respect for the learning of the author,[12] who thus justly and eloquently eulogised that great judge:—

“I felt the presumption of addressing such a request”—to be allowed to dedicate to him the work—“to a judge who has so often excited the admiration of the Bar, by a display, without effort, of an extent of knowledge in every branch of jurisprudence, which the life of man appears to be insufficient to acquire. If these considerations deterred me from making the application, I was encouraged to it by that judicial mildness and gravity—that urbanity and attention to the youngest counsel in the Court—the true mark of a great mind—which operate so powerfully to make your Lordship beloved by the Bar, and soften the splendour which profound knowledge, high character, and dignity shed around you.”

In the year following that which saw the third edition of the “Vendors and Purchasers,” and the first of the “Treatise on Powers”—namely, in the year 1809—Mr Sugden found time to write a valuable little work for the guidance of lay gentlemen in the management of their estates, entitled “A Series of Letters to a Man of Property, on Sales, Purchases, Mortgages, Leases, Settlements, and Devises of Estates;” in a thin octavo volume, consisting of twelve letters, all of a practical character, perfectly intelligible to a non-professional man, and admirably calculated to enlighten him as to the nature of these all-important transactions. This work, which passed through six large editions, has been long out of print; and but for the wise saw concerning “the last straw which breaks the camel’s back,” we might venture to intimate that Lord St Leonards would confer a very great favour on the lay public by reproducing these letters, adapted to the existing and greatly-altered state of our laws. We regard a work of this description, undertaken as it was by a lawyer of first-rate attainments and practice, as a very unassuming and disinterested service rendered to those who stand not a little in need of it. Three years afterwards—namely, in the year 1811—Mr Sugden gave to the profession an edition of the posthumous work of Chief Baron Gilbert on “Uses and Trusts”—which derived all its real value from the careful revision and “Introduction” of the accomplished Editor. These notes and introduction are of a most elaborate character, ably epitomising the law to which they relate,—chiefly to springing and shifting uses, and the law of perpetuities.

Between the years 1812 and 1836, we find Mr Sugden, from time to time, publishing pamphlets on subjects of great practical importance—such as the mischievous operation of the then (1812) existing Annuity Act, which, as we have already intimated, he succeeded in getting expunged from the statute-book, as productive of intolerable vexation and ruinous litigation—himself drawing the act (53 Geo. III. c. 141) in the ensuing year which repealed it, and substituted a better system.[13] Other subjects to which he thus addressed himself were the improvement of the administration of justice in the Court of Equity; the law of wills; the rate of interest and redeemable annuities; the appellate jurisdiction of the Court of Chancery and the House of Lords (1835); and on the late Mr Humphreys’ proposal to repeal the Laws of Real Property, and substitute a new code (1826), which Mr Sugden encountered with great power. His pamphlet, which was very elaborate, attracted much attention, and passed through three editions. With the exception of these minor and intermitting literary exertions, and preparing new editions of his great works, we now lose sight of Mr Sugden as an author—thus, as it were, only occasionally showing his head above the deep waters of Chancery practice—till a period to which we must in due time refer.

During his practice as a conveyancing counsel for about eight years, he more and more frequently varied its oppressive monotony, by going into courts of law to argue questions relating to real property. It was about the year 1812 that he took to arguing special cases in the Common Courts—a work at that time of great labour and anxiety, and very little profit. His first case may be seen reported as Goodtitle v. White, 15 East’s Reports, p. 174 (A.D. 1812). Here he was pitted against and defeated his formidable brother conveyancer, Mr Preston. In 1815 he argued in the same court, Wright v. Barlow, 3 Maule and Selwyn’s Rep. 512, but could not succeed in inducing the court to overrule one of its own decisions. In the latter year he argued the celebrated case of Doe v. Jesson, 5 Maule and Selwyn’s, 95, and again failed to convince the court; but on appeal, Lord Eldon and Lord Redesdale reversed the decision, on grounds suggested and argued by Mr Sugden. Another case argued in the same year, and reported in the same volume (p. 482), was that of Doe v. Roach, in which, after an arduous argument, Mr Sugden convinced Lord Ellenborough, and succeeded. He continued to argue cases in the Common Law Courts till the year 1822, when he finally relinquished the practice. All the cases reported in the latter year are reported in the fifth volume of Barnewall and Alderson’s Reports. One of them, Beard v. Westcott, p. 801, affords an excellent specimen of his close and lucid reasoning. Here he not only again defeated his astute opponent, Mr Preston, but prevailed on the King’s Bench to differ from the Common Pleas, though the opinion of the latter had been supported by the judgment of the Master of the Rolls, Sir William Grant. Three other cases, in courts of equity, afford instructive specimens of the power of this great legal reasoner—Bengough v. Edridge, 1 Simon’s Rep. 207, 227; Cholmondley v. Clinton, 2 Merivale, 221, 241; Lord Deerhurst v. The Duke of St Albans, 5 Madd., 243.[14] He at length began to consider whether he would not altogether quit chamber for court practice; a very bold step, indeed, for one who, with a large family to support, was realising an ample income, which he was about to surrender, perhaps for ever. It may be well imagined that this afforded matter for anxious and painful deliberation. His chambers were crowded with pupils, his tables groaned under “papers,” and most, if not all, the leading solicitors were his confiding and devoted clients—bringing him far more business than he could by any effort conscientiously dispose of, and which he therefore declined. A distinguished member of the profession besought him with the utmost, and almost tearful urgency, not to take a step which he believed, with many others, would prove fatal to his prosperity. We have heard that the late Vice-Chancellor of England, then Mr Shadwell, made no secret of his opinion, that Mr Sugden’s appearance at the bar would be a complete failure; he at length made up his mind, and passed the Rubicon. Shortly before he did so, he said to our informant, an eminent living Queen’s Counsel, with whom he was one night walking home, “I am going to give up conveyancing, and go to the bar. I don’t know whether it will answer, but I will try.” This was said with an air of great resolution; and it is for us to tell the issue. The intrepid aspirant after forensic honours found himself in a moment deserted by almost every client of importance, who appeared to feel personally offended at being, as it were, suddenly left in the lurch by their favourite conveyancer, on whom they had been accustomed to rely so long and so implicitly. For a very short time the forebodings of evil appeared being realised; and he had to sit in court, day after day, witnessing his once stanch clients pouring their briefs into the hands of other counsel, without vouchsafing a solitary one to the new-fledged one! Whatever inward mortification or apprehension he but too probably experienced, he concealed; saying, perhaps, within himself, If the great solicitors will not have me, perhaps some small one may, one fine day, give me an opportunity of showing that they will not slight me with impunity. By-and-by came Mr Sugden’s opportunity; he was intrusted by a “small” solicitor with a “small” brief; and it may be supposed with what perfect preparation such a man would come into court. On his consummate knowledge of the law of real property he consciously stood, as upon a rock; and his rigorous logic enabled him to wield that knowledge with irresistible effect. It did not take long to show those former clients, who stood aloof from him, that they were making a mistake—which we may be sure their deserted counsel would give them more and more frequent opportunities of feeling. A few exhibitions of his easy mastery over business, his steady self-possession and resolution, and the influence he was visibly acquiring over the court, soon began to put a different complexion on matters; and the commiserating smile, perchance, of supercilious rivals somewhat suddenly began to settle into an expression of something like a well-founded anxiety! Mr Sugden advanced rapidly into practice of the highest class. Every moment, during which he was not actually employed in court, he might have been seen sitting there answering cases, generally of an intricate and troublesome kind, buried in their details, undisturbed by all the hubbub around him, for he was always distinguished by the power of abstraction. All was thenceforth plain sailing. His old clients became as anxious to secure his services in court, as formerly in chambers. A few years afterwards—namely, in the year 1822—he received a silk gown from Lord Eldon, thereby taking another decisive step in advance, surrendering junior for leading business. In this year, also, appeared, edited wholly and elaborately by himself, the sixth edition of his “Vendors and Purchasers”—though how he found time to do so, at such an anxious crisis of his fortunes, and with such uninterrupted demands on his time and energies, it is not easy to discover. His silk gown was a splendid success, silencing sneers and whispering disparagements from every quarter. A consummate knowledge of the principles and details of real-property law, and conveyancing, and equity; rapidity of perception; conscientious devotion to the interests of his clients; imperturbable coolness and self-possession; the pith and brevity of his arguments, and lucid exposition of the most involved facts—all combined to invest his advocacy with such charms in the eyes of anxious solicitors and their clients, that retainers were soon showered on Mr Sugden from all quarters—and it was almost always a race between rival solicitors who should first retain him!

As though his cup of labour were not yet brimful, on the 20th February 1828 Mr Sugden was elected a member of Parliament for the borough of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, after a ten days’ expensive and harassing contest. He was returned twice afterwards for the same place, once on being appointed Solicitor-General. Mr Sugden sustained three other severe election contests, one for the Rape of Bramber in 1826, and two for the borough of Cambridge, against the present Lord Monteagle. He also sate for the borough of St Mawes (extinguished by Schedule A) during the period of the Reform Bill debates, and twice for Ripon, after his first retirement from the office of Lord Chancellor of Ireland, in 1835, as we shall presently mention,—representing that borough at the time of his second and final acceptance of the Irish Seals, in 1841. We doubt whether any man ever underwent greater labour than Mr Sugden throughout the harassing but prosperous twelve or thirteen years following his attaining the rank of King’s Counsel, particularly during the period of his sitting in the House of Commons. We first saw him one morning in the court of Sir Lancelot Shadwell, then the only Vice-Chancellor; and, without at first knowing who he was, were forcibly struck by his care-worn countenance. His manner was calm, but he looked harassed, as though he had sate up the whole night. And perhaps he had! He has often been known to return to his house, then in Guildford Street, Russell Square, from the House of Commons, at three o’clock in the morning, having been engaged incessantly in court all the previous day till he went to the House; and at six o’clock his servant would bring candles to his bedside, when he would sit up to read his briefs. At a quarter to nine o’clock he would be seen at Westminster, holding five or six consultations before ten o’clock, when the Lord Chancellor’s and Vice-Chancellor’s courts opened; then he was retained probably in every case in either court, which he would be addressing incessantly. At the rising of the court, a little after four, he would betake himself to the House of Commons, and remain here often till two o’clock in the morning, or later, reading his briefs in a room at the coffee-house at Bellamy’s of that day, during the intervals of his attending the debates, snatching a hasty dinner at any moment that served. Once he returned home at half-past six o’clock in the morning, and went to bed till eight o’clock, when he rose to prepare for such another day as the one before! How mortal flesh and blood—how any mortal brain, could stand such tear and wear as this, seems a mystery; but he was blessed with a fine constitution, and was of temperate and abstemious habits. The income which he derived from these labours, as may easily be believed, was very large. His fees were often enormous. The business rejected at his chambers’ door must have amounted to many thousands a-year. In the great case of Small v. Attwood he received four thousand guineas, and accepted the retainer only very reluctantly, and after having several times refused it. To protect himself as much as possible, he refused, for a long time, for any consideration, to go into other courts than his own, and never would give an opinion on a case, except in consultation with another counsel. The facility with which he despatched business was most remarkable; and that not cursory and slovenly reading of his papers, but really mastering and exhausting them. One evening after dinner, without leaving the room, he began to read his briefs for the ensuing day, which was a “Motion” day; but those intrusted to him were generally of difficulty and importance. He continued reading brief after brief as long as they were supplied to him, in successive bags, by his clerk. Having at length despatched them all, he saw himself surrounded with so many as astonished himself. He had the curiosity to count them; and in three hours and a half’s time he had thoroughly read thirty-five! By this time it was eleven o’clock; and instead of dropping exhausted into bed, he called a coach, and went down to the House of Commons! We have heard that when this little feat was recalled to his recollection, he vouched for its truth; but added, with a smile, that he never could have attacked such a number of briefs, had they been brought before him all at once, instead of in successive bagfuls! But what, after all, is such a life as this, but one of splendid slavery?

In the year 1829, Mr Sugden was appointed Solicitor-General, succeeding the late amiable and learned Sir Nicholas Tindal, on his receiving the appointment of Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas,[15] thereby, of course, superadding to his private professional labours the onerous cares of office. He received, as usual, the honour of knighthood, but did not retain office long. Passing over an interval of five years, we arrive at the year 1834, when Sir Edward Sugden’s name appears for the last time that we have been able to discover in the Law Reports, as counsel. He had ceased to attend the Rolls Court long before he retired from the Bar; and his last argument in the Vice-Chancellor’s Court is that of Cash v. Dean and Chapter of Ely, 7 Simon’s Rep. 211 (A. D. 1834); and his last before the Lord Chancellor was the well-known case of Kennedy v. Green, 3 Myhere and Keen, 699, in the same year. At the close of his judgment in this latter case, Lord Brougham, as Chancellor, took leave of the Bar. The seventh volume of Simon’s Cases, above referred to, incidentally affords some evidence of the extent, at that time, of Sir Edward’s business: the volume contains thirty-five cases, of which he appeared as counsel in twenty-seven! On quitting the Bar, he returned fees exceeding a thousand guineas.

On the 13th January 1835 Sir Edward Sugden was induced[16] to accept the appointment of Lord Chancellor of Ireland; a post, however, which he filled only three months, but long enough to exhibit the highest judicial qualities, and to cause general regret at being deprived of such services. On returning from Ireland he found himself, as we have seen, “for the first time in his professional life, in full leisure,” seizing the opportunity thoroughly to revise his “Vendors and Purchasers,” of which, in 1839, he published a new edition—the tenth—in three royal octavo volumes. In addition to this, he read and critically examined every reported decision of all the courts of law and equity. In 1837 he reappeared in the House of Commons as member for the borough of Ripon, taking an active part in the more important subjects of legislative discussion, particularly those with which he was so pre-eminently qualified to deal. In the month of October 1841, however, he finally retired from the House of Commons, on being appointed a second time Lord Chancellor of Ireland—a post which he occupied till the month of July 1846. We believe we speak the universal opinion of the Irish Bar, and indeed of the general public of Ireland, that it was a fortunate day that saw this great and upright magistrate a second time in its supreme seat of justice, to occupy it for a period of five years. We feel justified in attributing, not now for the first time, the utmost weight to the judgment of the Bench and Bar of Ireland. They are acute, dexterous, and learned, and capable of appreciating thoroughly a display of the highest judicial qualifications. Sir Edward himself declared on one occasion, recently, that he could never mention the Bar of Ireland but in cordial terms of affection and respect; and that, when he finally quitted Ireland, he had experienced not one unkind or disrespectful expression towards himself, nor witnessed any personal disagreement among themselves. He was undoubtedly exact and severe in maintaining that order in his court, without which, while justice is administered with difficulty, judicial decisions may fail to command the prompt respect and consideration which are their due. Himself profoundly attentive to what went on, involving such important interests, he also required that counsel should receive no interruption, and that they should address themselves, with all due brevity and closeness, to the real points at issue. An attentive and watchful Bar has a most salutary effect on both judge and counsel; and a court gravely and decorously ordered in all things, produces a fitting impression, as well on the public as on even the most disappointed suitor. Sir Edward’s great reputation as an equity lawyer stimulated counsel to make fitting exertions, and a protracted desultory volubility found no encouragement or even toleration in the court of Lord Chancellor Sugden, whose presence put even the ablest of his Bar on their mettle: while his deep attention repaid their pains in preparing and condensing their arguments. We are not, however, left to the expression of our own opinion. His first chancellorship lasted for only three months,—viz. from the 13th January to the 22d April 1835; and on the latter day, after having pronounced an important judgment, with a view to securing the due and economical administration of justice in the courts of equity, the Attorney-General rose and asked if his lordship intended to sit again? and being answered in the negative, thus addressed the Chancellor:—[17]

“My Lord, I should do great injustice to my own feelings, and, I am persuaded, to those of the Bar of Ireland, if I allowed your lordship to retire from that seat without attempting, however feebly, to convey to your lordship the impression of the deep sense which we entertain of the eminent ability and dignity of demeanour with which you have discharged the important duties of your high office. Short as has been the period of your lordship’s elevation, it has afforded ample opportunity for the display of judicial powers of the highest degree of excellence. Had that period been still shorter—had it been limited to the observation of a single day—it would have been sufficient to have impressed us with an indelible conviction of the profound, extensive, and accurate learning, the patience and discrimination, the masterly exposition and application of the authorities and principles of equity, and, above all, of the ardent love of justice, and elevated tone of moral feeling, which marked and distinguished your judgments. I have only to add our acknowledgments for your uniform urbanity and kindness, and to assure your lordship that you bear with you our regret at your retirement, and our most anxious wishes for your future happiness and welfare.”

To this affecting address the Chancellor, declaring that he had been “totally unprepared for it,” made a brief and dignified reply,[18] acknowledging the uniform kindness and attention of the Bar; after which one of the most eminent of the solicitors rose and expressed their concurrence in the sentiments which had been so eloquently expressed by the Bar.

Sir Edward Sugden’s second return to Ireland as Lord Chancellor afforded him a more extended opportunity of exhibiting judicial and administrative power. It is perhaps needless to say, that he manifested throughout the same acuteness, strength, stretch, and exactness of legal judgment, which had elicited, at the close of his former brief tenure of the Seals, the spontaneous and weighty approbation of all legal circles in Ireland. Every one of his judgments appealed from, was affirmed by the House of Lords, with the exception of two, and a single point in a third. The propriety of even these few reversals, however, is gravely questionable, and is denied by Sir Edward himself; who elaborately examines the grounds on which they proceeded, in his Treatise on the Law of Property, as administered in the House of Lords,[19] and thereby enables those who are competent to do so, to pronounce an opinion for themselves.

Two of his judgments in the year 1843 were attended by incidents so remarkable, as testified to us by those who were present and vouch for the facts, that we mention them. In the case of Box v. Jackson, Drury’s Reports 42–85, the case was deemed by the Chancellor of such difficulty and importance, that he requested the present distinguished Lord-Justice of Ireland, Mr Blackburn, then Master of the Rolls, to assist him in hearing it. On a subsequent day the decision was given—the Master of the Rolls reading an elaborate written judgment; at the close of which the Chancellor, “without the assistance of a single note of any sort,”[20] says our informant, “proceeded instanter to deliver his judgment, extending over seventeen pages, and comprising at once a luminous and minute critical examination of a long series of decisions, by Lord Hardwicke and other great authorities, from the year 1739 to 1818!” The point was, whether, by analogy to a fine at common law, the court had power to take the consent of a married woman, and by force of it give effect to a transfer by her of her equitable reversionary interest in stock: the Chancellor deciding, concurrently with the Master of the Rolls, in the negative. Immediately after delivering this judgment, the court adjourned for the usual brief interval; and on the Chancellor’s return, the whole Bar rose up to do him honour! The other case is that of Stackpoole v. Stackpoole, 4 Drury and Warren’s Rep. 320; in which, at the close of a learned argument by the most eminent counsel in Ireland, on the Chancellor’s inquiring whether the parties wished him to decide the question, or send a case to a court of law, and being informed that “it was the general wish that his lordship should decide the case at once,” he did so instanter, and elaborately, though it happened that he had not taken a single note of any argument, or case cited by counsel![21] Such an effect had the Chancellor’s promptness and felicity of judgment in delivering his vivâ voce judgments, that, on his beginning to deliver written judgments, the present Mr Justice Moore, on the part of the Bar, requested him to continue delivering judgments vivâ voce. It must not, however, be supposed that the Chancellor of Ireland was so absorbed with his judicial, as to be unmindful of the important duties devolving upon him in his administrative capacity. It were equally invidious and unjust to make or insinuate comparisons between Sir Edward Sugden and his predecessors or successors, in this latter case, or in any other respect; but all practical professional people in Ireland know under what obligations the public were placed, by their Chancellor, during the period referred to. In conjunction with the then Master of the Rolls, Mr Blackburn, he consolidated all the Orders of the Irish Court of Chancery, repealing all preceding ones, so as to render it unnecessary any longer to refer to a long series of Orders, many of them obscure, and totally inconsistent with each other. This proved a great relief to the suitor, and was a work of much labour; but, undoubtedly, no little had been previously accomplished by Lord Plunket. Another great benefit conferred by the Chancellor, was in respect of the grievous burthens inflicted upon suitors in equity, under the name of Searches for Incumbrances. He put an end to this grievance by issuing an order allowing solicitors a sufficient fixed charge for such searches; while their costs in other matters were placed on a new and equitable footing, as between them and their clients. Again, tenants of land, over which Receivers were appointed by the Court of Chancery, were subjected to serious hardships, in respect of the payment of their rents, or the reduction of them in hard times. These evils were effectually redressed by orders, and otherwise, of the Chancellor. Various other beneficial changes in the existing order of things were introduced by the Chancellor, beyond our province here to specify, but the effect of which is felt to this day. Infinitely to his honour were his unintermitted and powerful exertions in behalf of lunatics. The public minutes and orders, after his visits to the public and private asylums, where he made, personally, minute and laborious inquiries, pointing out what required a remedy, and affording that remedy where he had the power, would fill a not inconsiderable volume. He took a special interest in the district asylums, and in the proceedings for the custody of criminal and pauper lunatics. Nothing, in fact, relating to this unhappy class of our fellow-creatures, escaped the humanely watchful eye of the Chancellor, who issued orders calculated to subject the proceedings of all in authority in these institutions to publicity and responsibility. It is difficult sufficiently to estimate the amount of benefit thus conferred upon this large and deplorably afflicted class, and who, as will hereafter be seen, appear to have been always subjects of Sir Edward Sugden’s special solicitude, both judicial and legislative.

How it may be now, we profess not to be able to say; but it is well known that the magistrates of Ireland occasioned the Chancellor, at the troublous time of which we are speaking, almost as much anxiety and trouble as his judicial duties. He instituted an order of procedure in appointing magistrates, which operated most advantageously; his evident object being to conciliate the respect of all classes for the vigorous and faithful administration of justice, as well by these as by all other functionaries. He superseded magistrates without hesitation, whatever their position or influence, if he thought that the public interest required it; of which a memorable instance is on record, greatly to his honour, in respect of his resolute and impartial spirit. We allude to his dismissal of a nobleman of the Chancellor’s own political party, and his agent and brother magistrate, from the commission, for intemperate conduct towards each other on the bench. The matter was brought before the House of Lords, but the Government upheld their Chancellor with a high hand. It was, however, in the Repeal year, 1843, that the greatest amount of anxiety and responsibility was thrown on the Chancellor of that then distracted portion of the empire. In compliance with the views of the Government, he refused to appoint any man a magistrate who belonged to the Repeal Association; and in consequence of their acts and speeches, superseded on the same day Lord French and Mr O’Connell. A storm was of course the immediate result. The Chancellor’s letter conveying their dismissal was read in the House of Lords by Lord Brougham, who defended Sir Edward in a generous spirit, amidst repeated cheering; and it was indeed a most satisfactory and conclusive statement of the principles on which Sir Edward had proceeded. Acting upon them, he almost immediately afterwards removed numerous other magistrates, amongst whom were Mr Morgan John O’Connell, and Mr Smith O’Brien, for presiding at tumultuous Repeal meetings. When Mr Daniel O’Connell seemed bent on raising the standard of civil war at Clontarf, on the 8th October 1843, the Lord-Lieutenant (Earl De Grey) and the Chancellor went to England, to consult definitively with the Government on the threatening state of affairs; but on hearing of the meeting so appointed, returned instanter to Ireland. They pronounced the meeting illegal, and took steps so formidable and decisive, that Mr O’Connell and his agitation were crushed together. All this, however, is matter of history—that of a very momentous period. The calmness and strength of the Chancellor’s judgment, backed by his immense reputation, rendered a service to the menaced cause of order and good government never to be forgotten.

His judicial and administrative duties not being sufficient to satisfy this helluo laborum—as surely we may with justice style him—he devoted himself at every spare moment to the systematic revision of his “Treatise on Vendors and Purchasers,” and the compression of it into two volumes, instead of the three into which it had swollen in the preceding edition.

In July 1846, Sir Edward a second time resigned the Irish seals, with the regret and applause of the whole country, and especially of the legal profession. His administration of justice was pronounced to be unequalled in Ireland, even organs of public opinion not favourable to his party giving him in several respects the palm over no less a distinguished predecessor than Lord Redesdale. “He never,” says one of these now lying before us, “mixed himself up in the party-politics of the country: he had no followers or connections there; was ruled by no clique, and ear-wigged by no favourites. He was distinguished as a great Chancery reformer as well as a great Chancery judge. He reformed the Master’s offices, and established a tribunal for the taxation of costs. In matters of lunacy, and in the Accountant-General’s department, he introduced large and sweeping changes, some of which have been followed in England by Lord Cottenham.”

Relieved from the pressure of judicial and parliamentary business, Sir Edward betook himself to his lovely retreat on the banks of the Thames—Boyle Farm; but how his leisure for the next three years was spent, is attested by a large royal octavo volume of nearly 800 pages, now before us, entitled A Treatise on the Law of Property, as administered in the House of Lords, published on the 11th January 1849. We doubt whether any more remarkable work has been given to the legal profession during the present century, having regard to the qualifications of its author, the pains he has bestowed on it, and the commensurate interest, difficulty, and importance of the subject-matter. The general reader must needs take this for granted, as we have no means of giving him detailed proofs of our assertion. Imagine a lawyer like Sir Edward Sugden, who, previously to having been twice made Lord Chancellor of Ireland, as we have seen him, had been facile princeps as a real-property and equity lawyer at the bar for nearly forty years,—dealing with every case of the least importance,—sitting down with the pressure upon him of his own reputation, and a delicate sense of responsibility; imagine, we say, such a man devoting all his faculties to the task of weighing in the critical balance every decision of the supreme Court of Appeal during the last thirty years, with a view to developing them into a systematic treatise on the Law of Real and Personal Property, in respect of all the great moot-points started and disposed of during that long interval by this august tribunal, and thereby placing that law on a solid foundation! We know of no book entitled to be studied with greater attention and deference by any lawyer, from a Lord Chancellor, Chief-Justice, and Judge, down to the ranks of such of the junior bar as are capable of understanding and appreciating a performance of so high an order. Not a case is here dealt with which has not been evidently mastered in all its bearings, as if the writer had had the responsibility of adjudicating upon it: the facts and arguments, often of rare complication and difficulty, are in every instance stated by himself, and with so much brevity and clearness as to bring the point at issue at once before competent eyes. Take, for instance, the great case of Doe v. Perratt, decided by the Court of King’s Bench in 1826, occupying fifty-two pages in the fifth volume of Barnwell and Cresswell’s Reports; and seventy-one in the sixth volume of Manning and Granger—argued twice before the House of Lords, with the opinions of the judges, summoned to attend, declared by Lord Cottenham so much at variance, that “it was impossible that authority could be more equally divided.” The whole history of the case, the points of difference, and the main point itself, are disposed of with masterly precision in fewer than eight pages; whereas, without such assistance, it would require any man many hours to master the case; “a careful study of which,” concludes the author, “though it may perplex the student, will amply repay his trouble.” We had marked no fewer than twenty-one cases, all of greater or less permanent interest and importance, thus admirably dealt with, explaining difficulties, and pointing out where they are open to grave doubts; but, we are bound to say, without losing sight of the deference due to the exalted tribunal on whose decisions, nevertheless, he is sitting in judgment—moreover, he who was destined so soon after himself to occupy the Woolsack. To two only of the cases referred to can we briefly allude, as richly repaying the best attention which the reader can bestow upon them. The first is Gibson v. D’Este (pp. 614, 649), which is, so to speak, placed on the rack of an excruciating legal criticism, and demonstrated, as we think, to be a faulty decision. The other case is that of Howard v. Lord Digby (p. 162), also disapproved of by the author, all after a rigorous examination. It is highly interesting, if for no other reason, for exhibiting a vivid contrast between the characteristic methods of dealing with legal subjects, by Lord Brougham and Lord St Leonards; the one vigorous, graphic, and even dramatic—the other dry and cold, but with a certain Saxon purity and vigour about his style of expression. The subject is that of the right to pin-money; and Sir Edward has for once deviated so very far from his wont, as to enliven his work by an interesting note from his learned and accomplished friend Sir George Rose, as to the origin of pin-money. To a great extent, the author, as he explains, has relied on his own copious and authentic notes of the arguments in cases where he was himself engaged as counsel—and gives us, thus, accounts of cases decided between 1821 and 1826, not elsewhere to be found reported. The subjects are classified as relating to contract deeds, and settlements; testamentary dispositions; powers, in deeds as well as wills; and the rights and liabilities of lessors and lessees, mortgagers, and mortgagees, vendors and purchasers, husbands and wives. How long the author was occupied with preparing this work we know not; but we think no other living man would have ventured to do so under ten or even twenty years’ deep consideration. But where is he that could bring to bear upon the task such vast stores of experience and learning? Shortly after the appearance of this magnum opus, the Times newspaper (10th Dec. 1850) commenced a leading article with the following allusion—equally applicable at the present moment, and for the last five years—to the veteran in repose:—

“The name of Sir Edward Sugden is at once the ornament and reproach of the legal annals of this country. Unrivalled in the depth and minuteness of his knowledge of the more abstruse branches of the law, unequalled for logical power and critical acumen in discharging the duties of an advocate, a writer of the rarest excellence, a judge of unwearied diligence, and of authority second to none, he has been condemned by the vicissitudes of party and our wretched system of political judgeship, to pass the latter years of his valuable life in comparative obscurity and retirement; and this has happened at a time when great lawyers and great men of all kinds are growing scarce among us. Mediocrity is, if backed by party influence, everywhere triumphant, while one of the greatest legal geniuses that has ever adorned the bench, is carelessly flung aside, as if the country were too affluent in talent to require the aid of his extraordinary abilities!”

The occasion of this article was a speech delivered the day before at a county meeting in Surrey by Sir Edward Sugden—the only time in his life, as he stated, of his having done so—on the subject of the Papal Aggression. “That speech,” continues the editor, “appears to us one of the best which has been delivered on the occasion; combining a spirit of toleration and charity with a masterly exposure of the hollow sophisms of the Romanists and their pseudo-liberal apologists, and an exposition of the law showing indisputably that whatever difficulty may lie in the way of punishment, there is no doubt that an offence has been committed.” The speech in question deserved this eulogy, and had instant and great weight with the country at large, and the Legislature.

In less than a month’s time afterwards, Sir Edward Sugden made a second public appearance of quite a new sort—to vindicate the law of the land, which he himself had presumed to make such, against certain groundless accusations by Mr Dickens, in one of his tales, in a chapter headed “The Martyrs of Chancery.” The sprightly and gifted novelist had fluttered into the dusky regions of fact and law, with which he was necessarily unfamiliar; and he, as well as others who laboured under similar misconception on the subject of imprisonment for contempt of court, was at once silenced by Sir Edward’s lucid and authoritative account of the true state of the case.[22] To that subject, however, we shall have to advert again, in considering Sir Edward Sugden in another phase—that of legislator.

So determined was Sir Edward to illustrate the modest motto he had chosen—Labore vinces—that the same year, 1851, of which we have been speaking, beheld two more elaborate works of his appearing respectively in the months of June and December. The former was An Essay on the New Real Property Statutes, of the last few years, in one small octavo volume—a work so highly esteemed as to find its place at once in every lawyer’s library. The latter was a Concise and Practical View of the Law of Vendors and Purchasers of Estates, being a condensation of the two large volumes of the existing work into one octavo volume of upwards of 700 pages, being “an attempt,” as he states in the preface, “to compress the whole of the law on this important subject, into as narrow a compass as appeared compatible with accuracy and distinctness”—for which purpose “many portions of the original work have been rewritten, and every proposition added or retained, has been anxiously considered. The references, in some places, occupy nearly as much space as the text in its compressed form; but the writer was unwilling to deprive the student and the practitioner of any portion of a collection of cases which,” he adds, “it has required many years and much reading to bring together.” He also added no fewer than five hundred new cases! This work was not long in following the fortune of its predecessors, and was in time succeeded by that admirable contribution to legal literature, which appeared at the commencement of the present month of January, and of which we have already spoken. We have compared it with the “Concise View,” and the edition at large which that concise view followed, and have no hesitation in expressing our opinion that the alterations introduced are of great magnitude, and materially enhance the value of the work as a comprehensive, accurate, and authoritative statement of the law on this all-important subject. The second chapter, for instance, is entirely new, consisting of an elaborate and luminous exposition of “Sales to Railway Companies,” and containing “the law, so far as it places a Company, and an owner of land, in the relation of vendor and purchaser” (p. 57). The work is, in short, a perfect masterpiece of practical jurisprudence, more worthy than ever of the deference which has been paid to it for so long a series of years by even judicial authorities.[23] Before, however, quitting Sir Edward in his literary capacity—seeing him, as an ex-Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain devoting himself as patiently and laboriously to the re-editing and reconstruction of his earliest publication, as if his professional interests and reputation depended upon it entirely—let us offer one word of suggestion to those whom it may concern. Let a young gentleman, who has just donned his wig and gown, study to imitate the example of this great living sage; and if he must turn author at a period when he is really only commencing as learner, let him well consider the nature of the work which he proposes to offer to a learned profession. Let it not consist of hasty and flimsy comments on newly-enacted statutes, or on heads of law already bristling with text-books; but let a real want be looked for, and then let due time and consideration be devoted to supplying it. Thus it was that Edward Burtenshaw Sugden planted the acorn which he has lived to see flourishing in full vigour as the oak.

Within little more than a year after the Times newspaper had pointed to Sir Edward Sugden’s name as at once “the ornament and the reproach of the country,” that name had ceased to be a reproach; for the month of February 1852—within only a few weeks of his laborious appearance as an author, on the formation of the Earl of Derby’s Administration—saw Her Majesty deliver the Great Seal into his hands, those of as profoundly learned a Chancellor as ever served any of her predecessors. When, as Lord St Leonards, he first took his seat at Lincoln’s Inn, the spacious hall was so densely crowded with professional men, collected to see and do honour to the greatest lawyer of the age, that numbers were unable to get within the doors. The new Chancellor settled into the office, as it were, in a moment, as quietly as if he had occupied it for years. In fact, a more thoroughly businesslike Chancellor never held the Great Seal, as all with whom he had to do found out very soon. His practical penetrating sagacity, and boundless learning, rendered the appearance before him of the most able and experienced counsel, a matter, for them, of serious moment. They were somewhat peremptorily taught to come to the point as soon as possible, before one who puffed away the chaff from the wheat in a moment; who was always ready for work, and looked askance at suggested adjournments or postponements. The first appeal case before him in the House of Lords, on the 10th March 1852, only a week after he had taken his seat on the Woolsack, was that of De Beauvoir v. De Beauvoir (reported in the third volume of the House of Lords’ Cases, p. 524), involving the right to nearly six hundred thousand pounds, dependent on the construction of a singular and obscurely-worded will. The matter was argued at great length by eminent counsel; but when they, and all others, expected that the Chancellor would, as had been usual, ask for the “papers,” and “take time to consider,” he rose from the Woolsack, and delivered at once an admirable judgment, luminous and conclusive, occupying nearly twenty pages of the printed Report—going at length into, ably commenting on, and felicitously distinguishing a number of cases cited—as may be seen on reference to the report; which, we have personally ascertained from the learned reporter who took it down in short-hand, is given as it fell from the Chancellor’s lips. One of the most eminent solicitors in England recently observed, that he was concerned in an appeal arising out of a suit of many years’ standing, which had gradually become so complicated that neither counsel nor solicitor could really understand it! After lengthened argument before the Lord Chancellor, he rose from the Woolsack, as our informant and all others supposed, to move that judgment should be postponed to a future day; but—“nothing of the sort,” said the solicitor; “he immediately began to deliver judgment, which sounded as if he were reading off a chapter of his book on Powers. He cut us up root and branch. I saw only too clearly where we had all gone wrong; and had not a word to say, though he dismissed our appeal with costs!” How Lord St Leonards discharged his duties in his own court, it may be safely left to every practitioner in it to say. His manner was somewhat dry and quiet, but had real judicial dignity. Nothing could exceed the patience and attention with which he listened to every counsel who really addressed himself to the merits of the case under consideration, but who, at the same time, had knowledge and tact enough to see how early and tenaciously the Chancellor had grasped these merits, and to shape his course accordingly. No suitor ever had to complain that his case, how tangled and multifarious soever, had not been completely ransacked in quest of its merits, down to even the minutest details. And conclusive evidence of the sterling quality of the judgments which he pronounced—not after time taken to consider, but at the close of the argument—is afforded by the fact, that not one of them was reversed, or even qualified, on appeal. There is one interesting passage to be found in the evidence of Lord St Leonards himself, before the Lords’ Appellate Jurisdiction Committee of last session:—

“I could not myself have performed the duties of the office which I filled, except by disposing, as far as I was competent, of the cases as soon as the argument had closed; for otherwise I should have had the whole arguments operating and weighing upon my mind, night and day, till I had disposed of them; and the effect was, that there was no delay in giving judgment. Despatch is not undue haste. With a knowledge of the law on the part of the judge, and undivided attention to the arguments, I believe that, in a great majority of cases, a perfect master of the law may dispose of the greater proportion of them as soon as the arguments are closed.”[24]

In the great case of Egerton v. Brownlow,[25] we are not certain whether Lord St Leonards delivered a vivâ voce or a written judgment; but there it is, on record, a fine specimen of judicial reasoning applied to a question lying, however, very nearly on the confines of legislation. Before quitting Lord St Leonards in his judicial capacity, we must indicate the great service he did by his several rules and orders, whenever he deemed them necessary, in order to improve and quicken procedure in equity. Short, too, as was his tenure of the Great Seal, he disposed of such patronage as fell to his lot with a scrupulous regard to individual fitness, of which we could cite several instances of gentlemen promoted without any solicitation whatever, and to their own surprise. In another particular the conduct of Lord St Leonards is worthy of observation,—his objection to the facile and profuse creation of Queen’s Counsel, against which, as having a mischievous and derogatory tendency, he appears to have long set his face. In 1835, in his letter to Lord Melbourne on the Appellate Jurisdiction, we find him saying,—“I believe the true way to recruit the Inner Bar is not by batches, but by steadily advancing individuals, as their claims appear, by the exhibition of talents, learning, good conduct, and a command of business;” and he traces one cause of “the evil of excessively long speeches by counsel, to the great competition at the bar, since the number has received such large additions.” Acting uniformly on these principles when in Ireland, he did not wait to be solicited for a silk gown, as for a favour, by any gentleman possessing proper claims, but at the proper moment offered it to him; thereby infinitely enhancing its significance and value. While holding the Great Seal in England, he found the Inner Bar full, and did not appoint a single Queen’s Counsel.

In considering Lord St Leonards as a legislator, it is not our intention to dwell on his parliamentary speeches, though they have been many and important. That against the bill of 1853, imposing duties on succession to property, as well as the protest which he entered in the Journals of the House, appears to us unanswerable. His speech on projected improvements in the administration of the law, on the 16th November 1852, gave universal satisfaction; and that on life-peerages, on the 7th February 1856, was a calm but excruciating exposure of not only the impolicy, but the illegality of that step. The speeches, indeed, on that subject, of the Earl of Derby, Lord Lyndhurst, Lord St Leonards, and Lord Campbell, will ever reflect bright credit on the hereditary branch of the Legislature.

In sketching the character of a late luminary,[26] we “asked, with sorrowful sincerity and reluctance, what did he ever do to advance the interests of the profession to which he belonged?—and what page in the Statute-Book attests his handiwork?” In the case of the distinguished person now before the reader, the former question has been abundantly answered in the foregoing pages; and the latter admits of as conclusive and triumphant an answer, by a simple reference to the chief acts of parliament for which Lord St Leonards is responsible, and many of which were drawn by his own hand. We have taken some trouble to insure correctness,—but if we have made any material errors or omissions, we must trust to some future opportunity to correct them. Those which we cite will be found of an eminently practical character, conferring great and permanent advantage on the community, and redressing evils with which his vast knowledge of business, and unwavering watchfulness, peculiarly qualified him to deal.

(1.) The Annuity Act of 1813 (statute 53 Geo. III., c. 141), itself recently repealed, together with the Usury Laws, was drawn by Lord St Leonards, following out those views which he had urged in his pamphlet of 1812. That act had the signal merit of putting an end to a floodtide of ruinous and disgraceful litigation, for which Mr Sugden richly deserved the thanks of the country. (2.) The statute 6 Geo. IV., c. 93 (1825), to “render valid certain decrees and orders at the Rolls Court,” rendered necessary in consequence of Chief Baron Richards and other judges having sate during Sir Thomas Plumer’s illness at the Rolls Court, without legal authority. To avert the public scandal of avoiding so many important judicial acts, Mr Sugden, with Lord Eldon’s consent, prepared this bill, which became a law at the close of the session in which it had been introduced. (3.) The next statute is one reflecting peculiar lustre on the name of its framer—that of 1 Will. IV. c. 36 (1830)—in itself a code, having for its main objects to prevent long and continued imprisonment for contempt; to afford assistance and relief to parties poor and ignorant; and prevent obstinate parties from impeding the course of justice after the decree or order of the Court. This act was, two years afterwards, greatly extended by (4.) Stat. 4 Will. IV. c. 58. Had these been the only acts for which the country is indebted to Lord St Leonards, he would have earned an enduring title to their gratitude.

Having humanely provided a legislative remedy, he made the noblest personal efforts to carry it into prompt effect, frequently visiting the Fleet Prison—(how he found the time is hard to understand)—seeing and conversing with the impoverished prisoners, giving them wise advice, and himself actually paying, out of his own purse, the costs for which they were incarcerated, so as to procure their immediate discharge—and even assisting them afterwards! The scandal of throwing a man into prison for not “answering,” and then leaving him there to rot out the rest of his life, thank Heaven, can no longer exist. When Chancellor of Ireland, Sir Edward Sugden extended this admirable measure to that country, by (5.) Stat. 5 & 6 Will. IV. c. 16 (1835), the Government taking charge of the bill. (6.) Stat. 1 Will. IV. c. 46 (1830), amending the laws relating to Illusory Appointments, restored the law to its original state, putting the rule at law and in equity on the same footing with respect to appointments: a provision removing at once a prolific source of litigation, and enabling a parent or trustee to act so as best to meet the exigencies of a family, and give children aid and provision in proportion to their actual wants. (7.) Stat. 1 Will. IV. c. 47 (1830), consolidates and amends the law for payment of debts out of real estate—one of great importance, and a considerable step in advance, the Legislature having since gone still farther in that direction. (8.) Stat. 1 Will. IV. c. 60 (1830), is another act of great importance, investing courts of equity with ampler powers than they had possessed, with regard to trustees and mortgagees, and enabling them to make a perfect title to whatever they sold. This act Sir Edward undertook at the request of Lord Eldon; and the Legislature have since gone much farther in that direction. (9.) Stat. 1 Will. IV., c. 65, extended to Ireland by (10) 5 and 6 Will. IV., c. 17, arms courts of equity with very useful powers over the property of infants, married women, and lunatics. (11.) Stat. 2 and 3 Vict., c. 11, extended to Ireland by (12.) Stat. 7 and 8 Vict., c. 90, with careful modifications, conferred a vast boon on purchasers, and greatly facilitated the transfer of land—providing as it did a complete registration of various kinds of incumbrances, collected in one office, and allowing them to be searched for a mere nominal sum—a shilling. These acts were (in 1855) followed by (13.) Stat. 18 and 19 Vict., c. 15, conferring on purchasers further important provisions for their protection. (14.) Stat. 5 and 6 Vict., c. 123, for the first time required private lunatic asylums to have a licence, and placed them under salutary restraints and supervision. This act had to encounter fierce opposition, but succeeded, followed up, as we have already seen, by the Chancellor’s vigilant personal attention, in greatly ameliorating the condition and management of lunatics. (15.) Stat. 8 and 9 Vict., c. 115, appointed a taxing-master for the Irish Court of Chancery, thereby greatly relieving the overburdened Masters of the Court. This has since been carried much farther. (16.) Stat. 15 Vict., c. 24, after a vehement opposition, put an end to an evil utterly intolerable, and has proved one of the greatest blessings to the people, afforded by modern legislation. It puts an end to the incessant defeat of wills by petty technical objections, embracing every evil conceivable to occur through haste, ignorance, or accident. The editors of the new edition of the Standard Text-Book on Wills (Jarman), omit a long chapter of decisions of this kind, as “it is almost impossible that the validity of any will should hereafter turn upon them.” (17.) Stat. 15 Vict., c. 48, amends the law relating to the property of lunatics. (18.) Stat. 15 Vict., c. 80, abolishes the Masters’ offices, and expedites the business of the Court of Chancery. (19.) Stat. 15 Vict., c. 86, amends the practice and course of proceeding in the Court of Chancery. (20, 21, 22.) Stat. 16 and 17 Vict., c. 70, is for the regulation of proceedings under commissions of lunacy, and consolidating the former acts,—and itself constitutes a most important code; c. 96, for regulating the care and treatment of lunatics; c. 97, consolidating and amending the laws relating to lunatic asylums for counties and boroughs, and the maintenance and care of pauper lunatics. When these three acts were passed, Lord St Leonards declared, in his place in the House of Lords, that no other country possessed such excellent provisions for the care of lunatics and of their property—and none more minutely and anxiously careful than those which secure the welfare of pauper lunatics. He might have added, that the preparation of these enactments entailed upon himself protracted and exhausting labour. (24) Stat. 16 and 17 Vict., c. 98, provides for the further relief of suitors in the Court of Chancery, appropriating its unclaimed funds to the relief of the suitors, to whom they properly belong. This, also, is a very important act. Lastly, (25.) Stat. 17 and 18 Vict., c. 60, has for its humane object to make more effectual provisions for preventing cruelty to animals.—Here ends, as far as we know, the catalogue of Lord St Leonards’ contributions to the Statute-Book of his country: twenty-five in number, and those not showy, rash, and slovenly, but deeply-considered and skilfully framed; the result of great forensic and judicial experience, or, in some instances, masterly developments of alterations and improvements contemplated by others. We are, moreover, inclined to consider Lord St Leonards largely entitled to credit for the original suggestion of that bold enactment which called into existence the Incumbered Estates Court in Ireland. Unless, indeed, we are mistaken, he lately claimed the paternity of that measure, in speaking in the debate for renewing the powers of the Commissioners. It is said that in his original sketch of the proposed Court, transmitted to the late Sir Robert Peel, he observed that the Court ought to exist only until the mischief should have been remedied; that it was, as regarded property, what the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act was with reference to personal liberty. It is, however, undoubtedly possible that the existing scheme may have been devised by the Government before they became possessed of Sir Edward Sugden’s communication to Sir Robert Peel; though this has not hitherto been asserted. And these legislative labours have been continued during a long series of years, while Lord St Leonards was either burthened with enormous practice at the bar, or absorbed with judicial cares as twice Chancellor of Ireland, and afterwards of England (his is the only instance on record of such promotion;) or as a law-lord sitting on Appeals; or engaged from time to time writing profound and universally accepted treatises on the law, or carefully adapting them to successive variations in that law. The patience, the self-denial, the indomitable industry and resolution with which his great endowments and acquirements have been and continue to be devoted to the service of his profession and of his country, will enshrine his name in the memory of his countrymen, long after he shall have passed away from the scene of his untiring exertions. As author, advocate, judge, and legislator, he appears to exhibit a combination of claims to our respect and gratitude, that is unique.

Printed by William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh.

ENDNOTES:

1. These views are not an after-thought, but will be found expressed in our article on “The Peace,” written before the Treaty of Paris was ratified. Inter alia, alluding to the probable results of the Treaty, we observed—“By guarding the line of the Danube, while leaving open the Transcaucasian frontier and the shores of Anatolia, you change the main line of Russian advance from the western to the eastern side of the Black Sea. You divert it from Europe into Asia, and by so doing change the Powers by whom such southward progress brings her into collision. On the Danube, Russia has Austria for a rival; but for Asia Minor, Austria has no concern,—there Russia will meet no rival but Great Britain, who will be left to struggle with her single-handed.” And we characterised this as “the best method for directing the march of Russia from Europe into Asia, and thereby not only freeing France and her Austrian alliance from the rivalry and pressure of the Czar, but of raising a new and permanent source of antagonism between Russia and England,—every step of the former of those Powers necessarily bringing her nearer to the Indian empire, and line of communication therewith, of the latter. The general public, alive only to the interests of the moment, may underrate the importance of this stipulation, but its consequences will be none the less momentous because not immediate. It is a legacy of hostility between Russia and England which the future will duly honour.”—(May 1856, p. 617.)

2. The relation subsisting between Prince Yusoof and the Shah was openly acknowledged by the latter, who, even as reported by the Teheran Rouz Namé, or official journal of court news, thus addressed the Prince, when subsequently captured by the Persian army which besieged Herat:—“At that time we considered thee as one of our faithful servants, and thou wert under the shadow of our protection; and as it was for the advantage of our kingdom, and of the independence of Herat, to resist the overwhelming march of Dost Mahomed Khan, we therefore sent thee the reinforcements which thou didst require.”

3. Fact.

4. See the Scheme of Members for Minorities.

5. 1st September 1856.

6. Wilkinson’s Wallachia and Moldavia: London, 1820.

7. The treaty of Kainardjik (10th July 1775) gave the right of interference in the affairs of the Principalities to the Russian ministers resident at Constantinople, and bound the Porte to pay regard to their representations.

8. A Concise and Practical Treatise of the Law of Vendors and Purchasers of Estates. By EDWARD SUGDEN (now Lord St Leonards). 13th Edition. 1 vol. royal 8vo. 1857. Sweet, London.

Practical Treatise of Powers. By the Right Honourable Sir EDWARD SUGDEN. 2 vols. 8vo. 7th Edition. 1845.

The Law of Uses and Trusts. By the late Chief Baron GILBERT; with Notes, References, and an Introduction, by EDWARD BURTENSHAW SUGDEN, Esq., Barrister-at-Law. 1 vol. 8vo. 3d Edition. 1811.

A Treatise of the Law of Property, as Administered by the House of Lords. By Sir EDWARD SUGDEN. 1 vol. royal 8vo. 1849.

An Essay on the New Statutes relating to Real Property. By Sir EDWARD SUGDEN. 1 vol. 8vo. 1852.

A Series of Letters to a Man of Property on Sales, Purchases, Mortgages, Leases, Settlements, and Devises of Estates. By Sir EDWARD B. SUGDEN. 1 vol. 8vo. 6th Edition.

Pamphlets, &c.

Speeches, &c.

9. Preface to the fourth edition of the “Vendors and Purchasers” quoted in the preface to the thirteenth edition. In justice to the memory of the late Mr Preston, one of the most eminent conveyancers that ever lived, it should be stated that he also in early life published—we believe in his twenty-first year (1791)—an elementary treatise on the Quantity of Estates, which has, with modifications in successive editions, continued even to the present time a standard text-book in the profession. In its original form it may be regarded as the anatomy of the body of real-property law—and a doubt may be entertained whether subsequent editions were improvements on the first. This book laid the foundation, in his case also, of an enormous practice and great wealth; but never, as in the case of his distinguished contemporary, led to judicial office.

10. It is well known that for a single edition, Sir Edward Sugden once received the sum, unprecedented in the writers of law books, of four thousand guineas!

11. The uncle might have prohibited his niece from thus alienating, or “anticipating,” as it is called, any portion of what he had bequeathed her, but had not thought fit to do so. A woman who has thus property in equity, is the creature of equity, and may have as much or as little capacity of dealing with it, as her donor may have chosen to confer upon her. Possibly this was something like the argument of Mr Sugden, which is not given by the reporter.

12. Lord Eldon once sent for Mr Sugden into his private room, during the argument of an important case in which he was not concerned, to ask his opinion concerning the main point of law involved in it—relating, if we are correctly informed, to “springing uses.” Mr Sugden’s impression differed from that of Lord Eldon, who ultimately yielded to Mr Sugden’s.

13. This Act has itself just been repealed.

14. The principles involved in all these cases are elaborately discussed by Lord St Leonards himself in his Treatise of the Law of Property, to be afterwards noticed.

15. H. B. had a caricature representing “A Meeting in the Pleas”—between Sir James Scarlett, Attorney-General, and Sir Edward Sugden, Solicitor-General, with Sir N. Tindal on the Bench, and Sir Charles Wetherall and Mr Brougham in the wings.

16. Sir Edward Sugden was twice offered office by the Whigs, but he declined it.

17. Lloyd and Goold’s Reports of the High Court of Chancery, tempore Sugden, pp. 380–1.

18. Vide supra.

19. See them—Stokes v. Heron, p. 236; Shaw v. Lawless, p. 394; Creed v. Creed, p. 428.

20. This reminds us of the prodigious effort of Lord Lyndhurst, C., in the case of Small v. Attwood, which had been argued by Sir Edward Sugden.

21. In the course of his judgment he pronounced the late Lord Kenyon, “one of the most consummate Real Property lawyers that ever adorned the Bench.”—P. 350.

22. See the Letter in the Times of 7th January 1851.

23. We could fill a page with references to cases in courts of law and equity in which such judicial deference is paid to the “Vendors and Purchasers.” One or two of the latter instances may be seen in Matthews v. Bowles, 6 Hare’s Rep. 111; Wykes v. Lee, 3 Drury, 396. We should add that, with a dignified modesty, credit has never been taken, in new editions, for the adoption of rules which had been laid down by the author, or for the approbation bestowed on the work.

24. Report, p. 183.

25. Delivered after he had ceased to be Chancellor.

26. Blackwood’s Magazine, January 1846.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

Page | Changed from | Changed to
135 | hordes which overthrow in succession | hordes which overthrew in succession
174 | Ἄγε Σωγράφων ἄριστε Γράφε Σωγράφων ἄριστε Τεχνοκοίρανε ῥόδαιε Ἀπεοῦσαν ὡς ἂν εἴπω Γράφε τὴν ἐμὴν ἑταιραν | Ἄγε Ζωγράφων ἄριστε Γράφε Ζωγράφων ἄριστε Τεχνοκοίρανε ῥόδειε Ἀπεοῦσαν ὡς ἂν εἴπω Γράφε τὴν ἐμὴν ἑταίραν

175

Γράφε μοι Βάθυλλον οὕτω Τὸν ἑταῖρον ὡς διδάσκω Λιπαρὰς κόμας ποίησον Τὰ μὲν ἔνδοθεν μελαίνας, Τὰ δ’ ες ἄκρον ἡλιωσας Ἕλικας δ’ ἐλαυθέρους μοι Πλοκάμων, ἀτακτα συνθεὶς, Ἄφες, ὡς θέλωσι, κεῖσθαι Απαλὸν δὲ καὶ δροσῶδες Στεφέτω μέτωπον, ὀφρὺς Κυανωτέρη δρακόντων. Μέλας ὄμμα γοργὸν ἔστω, Κεκερασμένον γαλήνῃ* Τὸ μὲν ἐξ Ἄρηος ἕλκον Το δε τῆς καλῆς Κυθήρης Ἵνα τις τὸ μὲν φοβῆται Τὸ δ’ ἀπ’ ἐλπίδος κρεμᾶται. Ῥοδίνην δ’, ὁποια μῆλον Χνοΐην ποίει παρειήυ* Ερυθημά δ’ ὡς ἄν Αἰδοῦς (Λύνασαι) πάλιν ποίησον. Τὸ δὲ χεῖλος, οὐκ ἔτ’ οἶδα Τίνι μοι τροπῳ ποιήσεις * * Ἁπαλὸν, γέμοντε πειθοῦς —— Τὸ δὲ πᾶν, ὁ κηρὸς αὐτὸς Ἐχέτω λαλῶν σιωπῇ. Μετὰ δὲ πρόσωπον ἔστω Τὸν Ἀδώνιδος παρελθὼν, Ἐλεφάντινος τράχηλος. Μεταμάζιον δε ποίει Δίδυμάς τε χεῖρας Ἑρμοῦ; Πολυδεύκεος δε μηροὺς Λιονυσίην δὲ νηδύν. Φθονερηὺ ἔχεις δὲ τέχνηυ, Ὅτι μὴ τὰ νῶτα δεῖξαι, Δύνασαι* τὰ δ’ ἦν ἀμείνω. Τί πόδας με δεῖ δί δάσκειν; Λάβε μισθὸν, ὅσσον εἴπῃς. Τὸν Ἐκηβόλον δὲ τοῦτον Καθελὼν, ποίει Βάθυλλον. Ὅτε δ’ ἐς Σαμου ποτ’ ἐλθης Γράφε Φοῖβον ἐκ Βαθύλλον.

Τὸν ἑταῖρον ὡς διδάσκω Λιπαρὰς κόμας ποίησον Τὰ μὲν ἔνδοθεν μελαίνας, Τὰ δ’ ες ἄκρον ἡλιωσας Ἕλικας δ’ ἐλαυθέρους μοι Πλοκάμων, ἀτακτα συνθεὶς, Ἄφες, ὡς θέλωσι, κεῖσθαι Απαλὸν δὲ καὶ δροσῶδες Στεφέτω μέτωπον, ὀφρὺς Κυανωτέρη δρακόντων. Μέλας ὄμμα γοργὸν ἔστω, Κεκερασμένον γαλήνῃ* Τὸ μὲν ἐξ Ἄρηος ἕλκον Το δε τῆς καλῆς Κυθήρης Ἵνα τις τὸ μὲν φοβῆται Τὸ δ’ ἀπ’ ἐλπίδος κρεμᾶται. Ῥοδίνην δ’, ὁποια μῆλον Χνοΐην ποίει παρειήυ* Ερυθημά δ’ ὡς ἄν Αἰδοῦς (Λύνασαι) πάλιν ποίησον. Τὸ δὲ χεῖλος, οὐκ ἔτ’ οἶδα Τίνι μοι τροπῳ ποιήσεις * * Ἁπαλὸν, γέμοντε πειθοῦς —— Τὸ δὲ πᾶν, ὁ κηρὸς αὐτὸς Ἐχέτω λαλῶν σιωπῇ. Μετὰ δὲ πρόσωπον ἔστω Τὸν Ἀδώνιδος παρελθὼν, Ἐλεφάντινος τράχηλος. Μεταμάζιον δε ποίει Δίδυμάς τε χεῖρας Ἑρμοῦ; Πολυδεύκεος δε μηροὺς Λιονυσίην δὲ νηδύν. Φθονερηὺ ἔχεις δὲ τέχνηυ, Ὅτι μὴ τὰ νῶτα δεῖξαι, Δύνασαι* τὰ δ’ ἦν ἀμείνω. Τί πόδας με δεῖ δί δάσκειν; Λάβε μισθὸν, ὅσσον εἴπῃς. Τὸν Ἐκηβόλον δὲ τοῦτον Καθελὼν, ποίει Βάθυλλον. Ὅτε δ’ ἐς Σαμου ποτ’ ἐλθης Γράφε Φοῖβον ἐκ Βαθύλλον.

- Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.

- Renumbered footnotes and moved them all to the end of the final chapter.

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Table of Contents

BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE. No. CCCCXCVI. FEBRUARY 1857. Vol. LXXXI.

CONTENTS.

THE WAR IN ASIA.

SCENES OF CLERICAL LIFE.—NO. I. THE SAD FORTUNES OF THE REVEREND AMOS BARTON.

PART II.—CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

CONCLUSION.

TICKET-OF-LEAVE. A LETTER TO IRENÆUS.

THE ATHELINGS; OR, THE THREE GIFTS. BOOK III.—PART IX.

CHAPTER I.—AN OLD STORY.

CHAPTER II.—A CRISIS.

CHAPTER III.—CHARLIE’S PREPARATIONS.

CHAPTER IV.—GOING AWAY.

CHAPTER V.—THE OLD WOOD HOUSE.

CHAPTER VI.—AN ADVENTURER.

CHAPTER VII.—LORD WINTERBOURNE.

FROM PERA TO BUCHAREST.

LETTERS FROM A LIGHTHOUSE.—NO. I.

LORD ST LEONARDS.[8]

ENDNOTES:

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