to the family; and who already was known to have protected some domestics of the Chateau. From her own mouth Madame de Bonchamps learned that she had betrayed her domestics under fear for her own life, and that they had all been massacred. She told her horrible tale with composure, and pleaded the times as her excuse. Nevertheless she offered to receive her mistress for one night only: the Marchioness was in her power, and with the cruel apprehension that her own destruction and that of her children would necessarily follow if her pursuers appeared, she was compelled to accept this offer. The night passed in terror, but without peril. În the afternoon of the following day the woman, who appears to have been faithful in this instance, gave an alarm that the Blues (the Republicans were so called, because they had changed the national uniform from white to blue) were at hand. The Marchioness and her children fled on foot. The night was passed in traversing the country to St. Herbelon; and in order to avoid parties of the enemy, six or seven leagues were journeyed by them. A farm-house afforded a hospitable asylum; but the fugitives had no sooner reached it than they were attacked with the small-pox. The disease was mild in the Marchioness and her daughter; in Hermenée the eruption was imperfect, and the symptoms were threatening. Before they were yet recovered their pursuers came up. To harbour Vendeans was sure destruction; but the farmer would not betray his charge. He conveyed them to a barn open to every blast, in which they passed the night on straw. The cold was excessive; fatigue and sudden change of temperature threw back the eruption in Hermenée, and he expired in his mother's arms before morning. His death discovered their retreat, and they were again obliged to fly. Still covered with the small-pox, they removed to the house of a relative of their former protector, within a short distance. Hence also they were hunted down. The hollow of a tree about twelve feet from the ground, which they reached by means of a ladder, was their next hiding place. A small pitcher of water and a loaf of bread was their supply of food. The pustules of their disease were thick upon them, and the Marchioness had two wounds which had gathered in her knee and leg. Her child was on her knees, and every time she turned the pain was excruciating. During the first night the Marchioness never closed her eyes. Her daughter slept a little, but in her sleep she constantly groaned. When she awoke she asked eagerly for drink, and the scanty store was well nigh exhausted. At break of day a charitable peasant

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brought some brown bread and some apples: the latter they both eagerly devoured, but it only increased the burning of their fever. Exhausted with grief and watching, sleep awhile relieved them; but during another day and night the thoughts of the Marchioness were fixed on death, and she prayed earnestly that she might be permitted to survive her daughter, if it were but for an hour, that the poor child might be spared the horror of seeing her mother lifeless and insensible to her eries. On the third morning they received some milk which furnished a delicious and salutary draught. But their retreat had been discovered; a peasant in passing heard a cough from the tree, and mentioned it in the village. He was overheard by an old soldier who had served under Bonchamps, and who, knowing that the Marchioness was a fugitive, suspected the truth, and determined to relieve her. In the dead of the night he hastened to the tree, and called her by name. Her terror forbade an answer. He repeated his own, but she was unacquainted with it. He then added, "Trust yourself to a soldier of the army of Bonchamps." She no longer hesitated to discover herself, and the faithful veteran removing her from the tree, conducted her to his father's house hard by.

Here again, however, her reposé was short; the terrifying announcement of the Blues once more dislodged her, and she returned to the family which had secreted her at first in the tree. While here the house was repeatedly searched; on one occasion she could not find time to hide, and was confronted and cross-questioned by a hussar, whom with much presence of mind she frightened off by pretending to hear the brigands. By this, however, she felt that she had compromised her host, and leaving her child, who could not endanger them, under their care, she again betook herself to the tree. In this she stopped one day only, for no one dared to bring her food. The next was passed in roaming about the fields; the night in a ditch. From this she was aroused by the voices of some Republican soldiers, who detecting the name which she gave them to be false, arrested her. Her appearance could not betray her, for in the police description she was pourtrayed as young, blooming, and active; she was now bent down and lame, blotched with the red spots of the small-pox, care-worn in features, and with the air of a woman of forty. Still when she arrived at Ancenis she was recog nized by a fellow-prisoner, who incautiously pronounced her name. The Republicans were astonished, but they instantly treated her with respect, and gave her an escort, in which she found protection from the German officer who commanded it.

As she quitted Ancenis the sentinel on duty said aloud, that had he known her person he would have risked every thing for her safety, for that he owed his life to her husband at St. Florent. At Nantes military honours were paid her. In the prison to which she was consigned, and in which she remained seventeen days, she found two sisters of her late husband.

Still, notwithstanding her confinement, she felt no apprehension as to its termination, and her surprize was great when the military commission condemned her unanimously to death.

"I was not prepared for this sentence; it struck me at the first moment; however, I betrayed no weakness. But I immediately felt as much oppression of the heart as surprise. I recommended myself to God, and soon recovered that courage which a pious resignation always gives. I was conducted back to prison, and immediately my knife and scissars were taken from me. I told those who demanded them of me, that such precautions were useless towards a Christian, and that the cowardly crime of suicide could only be committed by the impious." P. 125.

"One of my windows looked out upon la cour du civil; one day as I was resting upon this opened window, not out of curiosity, but to avoid all conversation with my companions in misfortune, I saw young man approach, who hastily said to me, that he was anxious. to save me, and hoped to obtain a reprieve. I learned afterwards that this young man was the Marquis de Molard, who eventually perished at Paris on the scaffold. I have shed tears of gratitude for his fate; for the reprieve was granted. My persecutors, however, seeing that I inspired a general interest, and having in their hearts vowed my death, ordered me to be placed in a dungeon close to the cells of women of loose life. To hear continually their infamous discourse was to me a punishment as insupportable as it was new; my only resource was to pray to God. I fell dangerously ill, and I should have sunk under my malady, had it not been for the assistance I received from the members of the commune of Ancenis, who were prisoners as well as myself, but with much more liberty. Other condemned persons were successively brought into the same dungeon. Twice a day I saw them led to the scaffold; I prepared them for death, and I read to them the office for the dying, from a prayer-book which had been forwarded to me by Mademoiselle de Charrette, a relation of the General, the most useful present which can be made to those prisoners who can appreciate it. When I read these prayers, the poor condemned listened to them on their knees, clasping their hands with an affecting fervour. When they rose they embraced me tenderly, and our tears flowed together. I recommended myself to their own prayers, and they went to death with a courage which surprised their conductors.

“M. Haudaudine, a merchant of Nantes, whom I have already mentioned, who was one of the prisoners saved by my husband at Saint-Florent, and who preserved the most lively gratitude for this kindness, employed all the means in his power to obtain what was called my pardon. To accomplish this end, he conceived the plan of procuring the signatures of a great number of the prisoners of Saint-Florent to a petition addressed to the Convention, in which it was said that it was especially to my solicitations that the prisoners of Saint-Florent owed their lives.

"M. Haudaudine knew perfectly that I had no share in this action, since I was not even with my husband when he died; but he thought he might allow himself this deviation from truth to save me. In order to procure a greater number of signatures, this generous man went to several sea-ports, where he knew he should find some companions in misfortune who would not hesitate to sign the petition. All these benevolent steps were crowned with success; my pardon was granted, and I find a pleasure in rendering justice to the truth, that I owed my life to the gratitude of a republican." P. 128.

The pardon was thus obtained, but the tribunal of Nantes delayed to send the official letters confirming it. By an anonymous note, Madame de Bonchamps was strongly advised to urge the delivery of them, in order to prevent any fatal revocation. Her daughter was the only instrument by which she could approach the judges.

"We tutored my daughter, who was rather afraid of the tribunal, though she did not well understand what it was; but she did not hesitate to take upon her the message. I made her repeat a dozen times the phrase she was to use; she left me plunged in a vague but overwhelming anxiety. She arrived at the tribunal, where she entered with much gravity, and approaching the judges, she said aloud and very distinctly, Citizens, I come to beg the letters of pardon for mamma. After these words the servant-girl mentioned my name. The judges thought my daughter very pretty, and one of them, speaking to her, said he knew that she charmed all the prisoners by her voice, and that he would give her the letters of pardon, on condition that she should sing her prettiest song. My child had a wish to please her judges, and she thought that on this ́occasion the loudest strain would be the best, and that the assembly would be ravished by the fine song that she had so often heard enthusiastically repeated by sixty thousand voices, bursting forth on every side. She sung with all her strength the following chorus:

Vive, vive le Roi,
A bas la République.'

"If she had been a few years older, we should have been the next day both led to the scaffold ;-heroism would have irritated

this sanguinary tribunal-ignorance and ingenuousness disarmed it. They smiled; they made some particular reflections on the detestable education which the unhappy children of the fanatical royalists received, but they nevertheless granted the letters of pardon, which my little girl bore off in triumph." P. 135.

On the little which she could collect from the wreck of La Baronnière the Marchioness de Bonchamps struggled through the remainder of the Revolution. She has lived to see the Restoration, and the marriage of her daughter, and she points to these sources of alleviation in words of equal sensibility and piety, "I have an ineffaceable and mournful remembrance which I shall carry to the grave; but 1 still bless that Providence which has deigned to grant me all the happiness which can indemnify and console a mother."

It would be idle to add a single commentary to the abridgment which we have here offered of this heart-rending and noble-minded-story. It is a fit companion for the narrative of La Rochejaquelein, and we shall content ourselves with giving our cordial assent to Madame de Genlis's remark, which the publisher has adopted as his motto. That "no romance exists whose perusal can be as attractive as that of these Memoirs."

ART. III. Prison Labour, &c. Correspondence and Communications addressed to His Majesty's principal Secretary of State for the Home Department, concerning the Introduction of Tread-Mills into Prisons, with other Matters connected with the Subject of Prison Discipline. By Sir John Cox Hippisley, Bart. D. C. L. F. R. and A.S. a Bencher of the Inner Temple. 8vo. Pp. 234. Rivingtons. 1823.

SIR JOHN COX HIPPISLEY, a sedulous visiting magistrate for the county of Somerset, has discovered that the Treadmill is a cruel instrument of correction. The discovery was instantly communicated to Mr. Peel, who vouchsafed the same attention to Sir John which he had previously paid to Princess Olive of Cumberland, and asked the visiting magistrates of every Prison into which the machinery had been introduced, if it was attended with any injurious effects. They answered, one and all, in the negative. Yet Sir John persists that injury ought to have been done; and is not a little burt at Mr. Peel's unsatisfactory inquiry. If instead of