The theatre was specially brilliant, being crowded from floor to ceiling. The pieces- long after recollected were the "Carnival de Venise," "Le Rossignol," and "Les Noces de Ganache." Lady Clementina Drummond (later Davies) was present, and recalled the show of diamonds and gala dresses. Brightest of all was the Duchess. It was an odd and characteristic national trait, that when the Duke was observed to leave his box to pay a visit to that of the Orleans family, and was seen to "pass his fingers through the hair of the little Duke of Chartres," the pit should have applauded "à plusieurs reprises." It spoke volumes for the awkwardness of the situation of the Orleans family, and the rather coarse flavor which pervaded political relations in France. When it came to eleven o'clock, the Duchess complained of fatigue and rose to go, while the Duke attended her down-stairs to the carriage, intending to return and see the ballet.

At this time the Opera House was in the Rue Richelieu, and occupied a large block of building that stood isolated, the entrance for the royal family being in a side street called the Rue de Rameau. Visitors to Paris will recollect that this portion of the city still preserves its old character, having escaped the rage of the levellers and beautifiers. The streets are narrow, the houses high, while there is a certain air of squalor which is yet not unpicturesque. There the carriage was waiting, and a group of equerries standing at the door to attend the Duchess. There was only a solitary sentry, for the Duke, disliking the ceremonial attending royal departures, had only a short time before desired that the turning out of the guard should be omitted. All were bowing and had their backs turned to the street; the footman was putting up the steps, and the Duke, stepping back, was waving his hand and calling out joyously, "Adieu, Caroline! we shall soon see each other again! Suddenly a figure glided from the Rue Richelieu, passed between the sentry and the other persons, laid one hand on the shoulder of the Duke, and with the other stabbed him to the heart. Leaving the weapon in the wound, he fled round the corner of the Rue Richelieu, and darted down the Colbert Passage. So sudden, and at the same so effectually accomplished, was the deed, that the aide-decamp, De Choiseul, fancied it was some awkward passer-by who had jostled the prince, and thrust him back with a "Take care where you are going." Even the prince had felt nothing but a push. But the next moment he tottered, and gasped out that he was assassinated. Instantly the aide-de-camp, the sentry, and some others darted off in pursuit. The assassin had all but escaped, but mistook his road and was captured.

The Duchess, meanwhile, had heard her husband's cry, and would have flung herself over the side of the carriage, but was stopped by her attendants. He had just drawn the fatal weapon from his breast into which it had been plunged nearly up to the hilt, - a sharp two-edged blade,

was staggering, and would have fallen had she not caught him. They hurriedly placed him on a bench in the passage, and opened his shirt to examine the wound. She sank on her knees before him, and was trying to staunch the blood, when he exclaimed, "I am dying a priest ! Come, my wife, that I may die in your arms!" She threw herself on him and clasped him to her heart. She was deluged in his blood. The assassin had been brought into the guard-house, where the soldiers could scarcely be restrained from dispatching him on the spot. An ardent royalist addressed him, "Monster! by whom hast thou been urged to commit such a crime" (this objurgation of prisoners being tolerably common in France), and was "shut up," as the expression is, by the reply, "By the most cruel enemies of France." It was at first sapiently thought that this was a confession of conspiracy, but professional judges later saw that it was intended to be sarcastic.

Meanwhile, the Duke had been carried into the little ante-chamber which was behind the royal box, the most convenient place that offered the last place in the world where a prince could ever have supposed that he was to die. No such reflection at least would have occurred

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when the gay party retired between the acts after witnessing the regular operatic agonies of, say, the tenor's dying moments. And here it may be said that nothing more noble, or Christian, or becoming a descendant of St. Louis, could have been conceived than the way in which this dying Duke comported himself. When he recovered consciousness, his first words were, "Is he a foreigner?" and on being told that he was not, said sadly, "It is a cruel thing to die by the hand of a Frenchman." The doctors had now arrived, and some members of the royal family. The wretched wife was on her knees; her rich dress, flowers, and jewels all bathed in blood; while through the slender partition came the loud crash of the orchestra, and the sound of bursts of applause. The ballet was still going on. But gradually the news spread, the performance terminated, and the audience departed, awe-stricken and whispering. That night there was a brilliant ball at the Duchess of Albuefera's, to which the news was presently brought. The dancing stopped, the guests gathered in groups, and soon silently departed.

Now the Duke's own surgeon actively applied his mouth to the wound to encourage the flow of blood, for the prince was oppressed by the inward bleedinga step of considerable risk. "What are you doing?" he said, gentlypushing away this faithful servant; "the wound may be poisoned." Now, priests, surgeons, more members of the family began to fill the little room; his little girl was brought by the governess. "Poor child!" he murmured, may you be less unfortunate than your family has been." All that he longed and prayed for now was to see the King, principally for the purpose of obtaining the pardon of the assassin. This was no romantic whim, but his ardent, eager purpose, up to the last moment.

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He was now carried into the committee room of the administration, where it was found necessary to enlarge the wound. The great Dupuytren had now arrived, and proceeded to perform this operation. Nothing could exceed the patient's resignation and piety. It was then that he begged that his two illegitimate children should be brought to him, and the scene begins to lose something of its dignity from the rather demonstrative "effusion' of those about him. They were sent for, and "two graceful little girls" were roused from their sleep and brought in. The Duchess" threw herself on the incident" with a passionate excitement. She would be their mother. She led up her own little daughter to them with the invitation, "Embrace your sister," and whispered to her husband," Charles, I have three children now!" An austere voice that of the ascetical Duchess of Angoulême came from behind the couch," She is sublime!" The "two graceful little girls" were later adopted into the family, and brought up under the same governess with the lawful offspring. Towards three o'clock he began to grow weaker, and the last rites of the Church were administered by the Bishop of Chartres, the Duke making his confession aloud, and asking pardon from those present for any scandals which his life had occasioned. It seems rather a hard lot that when a person of such distinction in France dies, he should be obliged to hold a sort of levée of all the important functionaries of the kingdom, who come to offer their compliments, or at least sympathy, at so dreadful a moment. Thus "the marshals of France were now among the crowd gathered round the couch, which, by the way, had been hurriedly made up out of such stage cushions and properties as came to hand. To the marshals he said, he wished that he could have died on the field of battle in the midst of them. Still he was looking anxiously for the king, whom, it is to be presumed, they did not wish to disturb, and was listening eagerly for the sounds of his arrival.

At last, about five o'clock, when the Duke was beginning to sink, he cried out, "I hear the escort," and the clatter of cavalry was heard in the street. The narrow approaches were crowded with soldiers, and the roused inhabitants of the quarter saw with wonder the flaring torches and the glitter of arms. Almost the first words of the Duke were an imploring appeal for mercy for the assassin. The King gently but warily put it aside. "My son, you will get

better. We will speak of this again. We must think of you now." The Prince murmured, " And yet the man's pardon would have soothed my last moments." It must be said that public justice might have made this sacrifice, as the person most injured required it; and some extreme punishment, worse in severity than death itself, might have been devised to satisfy the law.

The end was now at hand. With an ejaculation, “Oh, blessed Virgin, aid me! Oh, unhappy France!" he expired. But he had made one speech which almost imported the element of romance into the ghastly scene. The malicious, while giving credit to the Orleans family for deep grief and sympathy, credited them with a certain complacency, human enough, which found comfort in thinking that this catastrophe had effectually cleared the road to the throne. Had such a feeling been in their breast, it must have been chilled by the strangely dramatic incident that occurred. When the Duke saw the Duchess overwhelmed with anguish at the surgical operation they were performing, and vainly tried to console her, he suddenly said, in a strong voice, "My love, you must not let yourself be overwhelmed with sorrow in this way. You must take care of yourself for the sake of the child that you bear next your heart!"

At these words, continues the account, a sort of electric flutter passed over all present, with the exception, it might be insinuated, of those whose interests the news promised to affect. There was something, indeed, mysteriously apropos in this sudden announcement of life in the midst of death. A strange mystical being who had visions had been brought to the King a few months before, and had uttered a sort of exalted prophecy, "Out of death should spring life!" These words were now recalled over the stage couch on which the dead prince was stretched.

No announcement of the kind, or of such importance, was, perhaps, ever made under such circumstances, or so much apropos; and thus mysteriously was the coming of the COUNT OF CHAMBORD announced to the world.

LINCOLNSHIRE SCENERY AND CHARACTER AS ILLUSTRATED BY MR. TENNYSON.

As a Lincolnshire man, and long familiar with the district in which Mr. Tennyson was born, I have often been struck with the many illustrations of our county's scenery and character to be found in his poems. What Virgil has done for Mantua and its slow, winding river; what Horace has done for Bandusia and the Apulian Apennines; what Wordsworth has done for the English Lakes, and Scott for the Highlands, that our poet has done for the homelier scenes of his boyhood and early manhood in Mid-Lincolnshire.

They live for us in his pages depicted with all the truth and accuracy of a photograph. This, I think, will appear from the following paper, in which I have sought to bring together the chief passages that bear upon Lincolnshire scenery out of Mr. Tennyson's poems.

And to begin with, his birthplace, Somersby - of which parish Mr. Tennyson's father was the rector, and where he passed with little interval the first twenty-five years of his life is a quiet, wooded village, "pleasantly situated," as the guide-books say, at the foot of the South Wold. The country about it is soft and pastoral, with small villages lying close together. To the north rises the long back of the wold, with its steep white road that climbs the hill above Thetford to the south the land slopes gently to a small, deep-channelled brook which rises not far from Somersby, and flows just below the parsonage garden. This home-scene is pictured to us in the "Ode to Memory, written very early in life," first published in 1830.

"Come forth, I charge thee! arise,

Thou of the many tongues, the myriad eyes!
Thou comest not with shows of flaunting vines
Unto mine inner eye

Divinest memory!

Surely very remarkable verse for a boy still in his teens! "Non sine Dîs animosus infans." But mark the illustra

tion of the local scenery- "the woods that belt the gray hill-side " -the trees of the spot - elm and poplar — and, above all, the brook. This brook will occur again and again in Mr. Tennyson's poems. It rises, we have seen, a little way above Somersby, runs beneath the village, as here described, over "matted cress and ribbed sand," 66 narrow for a boy could jump it with deep banks, eating its way with innumerable links and turnings, and serving to drain a large district, "drawing into its narrow earthen urn, in every elbow and turn, the filtered tribute of the rough woodland." A little below Somersby it is dammed up to turn a small water-mill. And there by its banks we find the poet, in another exquisite lyric - "The Miller's Daughter"-published in 1833.

"How dear to me in youth, my love,
Was everything about the mill:
The black and silent pool above,

The pool beneath that ne'er stood still;
The meal-sacks on the whitened floor,
The dark round of the dripping wheel,
The very air about the door"

Made misty by the floating meal!

I loved from off the bridge to hear
The rushing sound the water made,
And see the fish that everywhere

In the back-current glanced and played;
Low down the tall flag-flower that sprung
Beside the noisy stepping-stones,

And the massed chestnut boughs that hung
Thick studded over with white cones."

The brook has a sandy bottom, where shoals of small fish delight to disport themselves. And it may be that it was here that Mr. Tennyson took his simile in "Enid," where the panic-stricken followers of false Lémours vanish at the charge of Geraint, —

"Like a shoal

Of darting fish that on a summer morn
Come slipping o'er their shadows on the sand.
But if a man who stands upon the brink
But lift a shining hand against the sun,
There is not left the twinkle of a fin

Betwixt the cressy islets white with flowers."

Allusions to the same brook may be seen in “In Memoriam," No. xcviii., where it is described as swerving "To left and right through meadowy curves That feed the mothers of the flock.'

It flows in an easterly direction below Somersby, "a rivulet, then a river," and after a course of some length, through thorp and village, taking its name from each in turn, it enters the sea at a spot called Gibraltar Point, where it forms Wainfleet haven. Here begins that long line of sand-hills or dunes which stretches northward to the Humber, and which by a narrow ridge wards off the German Ocean from the rich Lincolnshire marsh, a tract

of pasture land varying from four to eight miles in width, which lies between the sea and the wold.

These sand-hills, with the flat shore on the one side and the fertile marsh on the other, find frequent mention in Mr. Tennyson's poems. His first sight of the sea was on the Lincolnshire coast; and there it is known that many of his earlier poems were written and revised, mapa Oiva πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλασσης.

The quotations will show how accurately he has seized the peculiar features of our coast, its long-retreating tides, its salt creeks, its heavy-plunging seas. Thus, to go back to the "Ode to Memory:

Ever retiring thou dost

"Artist-like

gaze

On the prime labors of thine early days:

No matter what the sketch might be,

Whether the high field or the bushless Pike:

Or even a sand-built ridge

Overblown with murmurs harsh,

Or even a lowly cottage, whence we see

Stretched wide and wild the waste enormous marsh,
When from the frequent bridge,

Emblems or glimpses of eternity,

The trenched waters run from sky to sky."

In the "Palace of Art" we have these picturesque lines:

"A still salt pool locked in with bars of sand

Left on the shore, that hears all night

The plunging seas draw backward from the land
Their moon-led waters white."

There we see our coast at low water, with its shallow
creeks banked in by amber bars of sand; and in "Locks-
ley Hall" we have that same coast in another aspect :-
"Locksley Hall that in the distance overlooks the sandy flats,
And the hollow ocean ridges roaring into cataracts."

We hear in this the mighty sound of the breakers, as they fling themselves at full tide with long-gathered force upon the slope sands of Skegness or Maplethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast. Nowhere is ocean grander in a storm; nowhere is the thunder of the sea louder, nor its waves higher, nor the spread of their waters on the beach wider. Mr. Tennyson has pictured it all in a splendid passage in one of his latest works, "The Last Tournament:

"Arthur-deigned not use of word or sword
But let the drunkard

Fall. As the crest of some slow dashing wave
Heard in dead night along that table shore
Drops flat, and after the great waters break
Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves,
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,
From less and less to nothing."

The only fault here is the unworthiness of the object which suggests the comparison. But the simile itself is magnificent, and reminds one of Virgil's "neque ipso monte minor procumbit (Georg. III., 1177), a poet to whom Mr. Tennyson offers many points of resemblance.

Three other passages I find which bear evidence of being composed on recollections of the Lincolnshire shore. This from " A Dream of Fair Women : "

"So shape chased shape as swift as when to land
Bluster the winds and tides the selfsame way,
Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand,
Torn from the fringe of spray."

With regard to the last, I may remark that Sir H. Holland, in his very interesting "Life Recollections," expresses surprise that no writer in prose or verse has noticed the phenomenon of the sun and moon both at full above the horizon at the same time. But he must have overlooked these lines, which show that long ago Mr. Tennyson had seen and recorded this very sight. Where he saw it admits of hardly a doubt - on the low dunes of the Lincolnshire coast, where at one time the red sun may be seen setting over the wide marsh, and the full moon rising out of the eastern sea.

Probably it was from the same position that Mr. Tennyson watched those glorious autumn sunsets which painters are familiar with on our flat coast, one of which he has sketched for us in a single line:

"The wide-winged sunset of the misty marsh."

Farther illustrations of the Lincolnshire landscape, and particularly the landscape about Somersby, are met with in "In Memoriam," lxxxvii., xciii., xcviii., xcix., c. - Edition 1850. Here we find many a characteristic of the county. The 66 sheep-walk up the windy wold;" the "knoll where the cattle love to lie in summer, adorned with "ash and haw," the ash being preeminently the Lincolnshire tree, and noticed elsewhere by the poet for its backwardness in coming into leaf:

"Delaying as the tender ash delays

To clothe herself when all the woods are green." And again,

"Black as the ash-buds in the front of March."

The " quarry," trenched along the chalk hill, the brook, "pleasant fields and farms," the trees with unlopped boughs, not trimmed up to the likeness of radishes, as is the case in some counties, but free to spread their "dark arms over field and lane. One other mark of the district may be noticed from "In Memoriam," xxviii., and that is the nearness of the Lincolnshire villages to each otheras evidenced by the poet hearing at one time four peals of Christmas bells. It is the custom in Lincolnshire to ring for a month or six weeks before Christmas, and a late traveller at that period of the year may often realize for himself the following description: :

"The time draws near the birth of Christ.
The moon is hid: the night is still,
The Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist.
"Four voices of four hamlets round,

From far and near on mead and moor,
Swell out and fail, as if a door
Were shut between me and the sound.

"Each voice four changes on the wind

That now dilate, and now decrease;
Peace and good-will, good-will and peace,
Peace and good-will to all mankind."

Take this from "Mariana :".

"From the dark fen the oxen's low
Came to her without hope of change
In sleep she seemed to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange."

The grange itself still exists amongst us, with its old moat unhealthily near, and sluggish, stagnant waters thickcoated with duck-weed, just as it is here described :—

"About a stone-cast from the wall
A sluice with blackened water slept,
And o'er it many, round and small,
The clustered marish-mosses crept."

These marish-mosses, “green and still," appear again in "The Dying Swan," which opens with a sketch sad enough, but which will be recognized as Lincolnshire under its least cheerful aspect, when the east wind prevails;

"The plain was grassy, wild, and bare,
Wide, wild, and open to the air,
Which had built up everywhere

An under-roof of doleful gray."

The desolate feeling called forth here is kept up in the closing lines of the poem-lines of matchless melody, descriptive of common, familiar growths, such as the locality presented to his view:

"And the creeping mosses and clambering weeds,
And the willow-branches hoar and dank,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds,
And the wan-worn thorns of the echoing bank,
And the silvery marish-flowers that throng
The desolate creeks and pools among,
Were flooded over with eddying song."

From the "May Queen" I may quote, as illustrative of the landscape

"You'll never see me more in the lone, gray fields at night: When from the dry, dark wold the summer airs blow cool On the oat-grass, and the sword-grass, and the bulrush in the pool."

This enumeration of the various grasses leads us to the allusions in Mr. Tennyson's poems to the wild-flowers of our land. A whole garland of these might easily be gathered from the "May Queen" alone; and conspicuous among them would be the marsh marigold, "which shines like fire in swamps and hollows gray." Nor is it for our wild-flowers only that we look in these poems. In one short piece entitled "Song," which stands next to the "Ode to Memory" and with it was published in 1830, Mr. Tennyson has given us a garden - an old-fashioned English garden, with old-fashioned English flowers, in the season of decay - such a garden as may still be found attached to quiet, simple homes in Lincolnshire. I shall ask for space to quote the whole of it:

"A Spirit haunts the year's last hours, Dwelling amid their yellowing bowers : To himself he talks;

For at eventide, listening earnestly,

At his work you may hear him sob and sigh In the walks.

Earthward he boweth the heavy stalks

Of the mouldering flowers:

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower

Over its grave i' the earth so chilly;

Heavily hangs the hollyhock,

Heavily hangs the tiger lily.

The air is damp, and hushed, and close

As a sick man's room when he taketh repose

An hour before death;

My very heart faints, and my whole soul grieves,

At the moist, rich smell of the rotting leaves,

And the breath

Of the fading edges of box beneath,

And the last year's rose.

Heavily hangs the broad sunflower

Over its grave in the earth so chilly; Heavily hangs the hollyhock,

Heavily hangs the tiger-lily."

What true and faithful painting! And this was written more than forty years ago!-before the Pre-Raphaelite was heard of. Painter and poet, not a few of them have since trodden in Mr. Tennyson's footsteps, and earned a just renown by careful and minute delineation of Nature. "More can raise the flowers now, for all have got the seed."

All honor to him who first introduced it amongst us who "once in a golden hour" cast this seed into the earth, who has opened our eyes to the glory of common

things enforces more than any man of this generation the Master's lesson, “consider the lilies, how they grow taught us to see in the meanest object at our feet the work of a Divine Architect, full of wisdom and full of beauty, "a miracle of design."

For illustration of Lincolnshire character we naturally turn to those well known personages, "The Northern Farmers," old and new style. As regards the first, I will only say that he is a type of the past: that the man, like the mastodon, no longer exists amongst us. That he did exist, and that Mr. Tennyson saw him, I have no doubt. But he has long been in his grave, and a more refined heir stalks about his fields.

With regard to the second, he, too, with his horse "Proputty," is of a bygone age. The present Lincolnshire farmer goes to market in a gig, or oftener by rail. But though the outward man has perished, not so has his teaching. Not to marry the governess; to look out for a wife with a dowry; the value of money; how the having it makes a "good un;" the want of it, the thief; these are sentiments by no means obsolete, not confined to one class, or one country, or one age. Materfamilias in her London house is entirely in accord with the Northern Farmer on all these points. Only she hardly expresses herself so forcibly.

And it is for this, for the wonderful vigor and raciness of the language, that the poem before us, and its pendant, are so truly admirable and valuable. Our dear old Doric dialect is - I grieve to say-dying out. H. M. Inspector is robbing us of our fathers' tongue. We see the spoiler everywhere at his ruthless work, and we are powerless to stop him. In a few years we shall all talk alike and spell alike, and all alike use words to conceal our real thoughts. The more the reason that we should be grateful to Mr. Tennyson for thus preserving to us two types of the yet unsophisticated Lincoln farmer in these imperishable poems.

I am no critic, but when I hear, what the critics say, the talk there is of Mr. Tennyson wanting force, and the power to individualize, I wish to ask where will you find these qualities if not in the two "Northern Farmers"?

Perhaps I might add to their portraits as distinct as they in individuality · the sketch of Sir Walter Vivian in the epilogue to the Princess, whom, as a Lincolnshire man, I would fain claim for a compatriot :

"No little lily-handed Baronet he,

A great broad-shouldered, genial Englishman,

A lord of fat prize oxen and of sheep,

A raiser of huge melons and of pine,

A patron of some thirty charities,

A pamphleteer on guano, and on grain,

A quarter-sessions chairman, abler none;

Fair-haired and redder than a windy morn.

Now shaking hands with him, now him, of those

That stood the nearest - now addressed to speech —

Who spoke few words and pithy."

Lincolnshire has hitherto had scarce justice done her. Viewed by the hasty traveller from the railroad which passes over the fens and avoids the hill country, she has been denied a claim to beauty 66 a flat land, a prosaic land, a land of corn and cattle; rich, if you like, as old Boeotia was rich in material riches, in fat sheep and oxen, but not rich in interest for the tourist, not a land to foster genius and feed the imagination."

But surely the truth is otherwise. Lincolnshire a great part of it-in home pastoral scenery is not behind other counties, while in her wide-extended views, in her open wolds, in her sounding shore and shining sands, in her glorious parish churches, with their gigantic steeples, she has charms and beauties of her own. And as to fostering genius has she not proved herself to be the "meet nurse of a poetic child"? For here, be it remembered, here in the heart of the land, in Mid-Lincolnshire, Alfred Tennyson was born; here he spent all his earliest and freshest days; here he first felt the divine afflatus, and found fit material for his muse.

PARISIAN JOURNALISTS OF TO-DAY.

I.

WILL the reflective reader ask himself why it is that French journalists absorb so much larger a share of public attention than the newspaper writers of other countries? They are not more argumentative than the English, they are unquestionably less wise than Germans, they yield to Americans in the versatility of polemical invective, and even to the Irish in their favorite art of screaming about nothing; as to epigrammatic wit, the Italians with their pasquinades are, in this respect, more than their masters. Frenchmen themselves explain the interest they excite by pretending that they are the leaders of human thought; but this is a little piece of vanity with not much truth in it. The French are great adapters and magnifiers of other men's ideas, but their genius is not of the inventive sort. All that is practical in their political theories comes to them from England or America; and when the Communalists raised the standard of rebellion in the name of what seemed to them a new and indispensable right—that is local self-government - they were only claiming an institution which has flourished in Britain for now five hundred years. Even in philosophy, the Encyclopædists of the eighteenth century, who are credited by their countrymen with having been the first apostles of rationalism, did nothing but follow the lead of Hobbes and Locke; and as their writings were at bottom rather attacks upon Popery and the Jesuits than deliberate impeachments of the Christian dogma, it may be said that they were virtually continuers of the Reformation. The Revolutionists of '93 certainly seemed to go a good way in experimental novelty, but there is scarcely a single one of their vagaries which, if we look to it, can be accepted as original. When they beheaded their king and republicanized the calendar, they repeated acts perpetrated with much less fuss and disorder by the Roundheads; their Rights of Man were a plagiarism on paper, for few of the "Rights" took living effect of Magna Charta and of the Retti del popolo promulgated by Thomas Aniello (Masaniello) at Naples in 1648; their Goddess Reason had been imagined so far back as 1535 by that Anabaptist fanatic John Bokkold better known as John of Leyden - who stirred up Munster against its bishop-prince, and held anarchical revels in the city for six months; and even that queerest of Republican innovations, which consisted in placing military commanders under the constant supervision of civil commissioners, was simply borrowed from the Dutch, whose meddlesome deputies, as we know, hampered and plagued Marlborough almost to perdition. France, it may be urged, has artistic and literary renown, a great name in science, immense military glory, and a moral influence reaching far beyond the confines of her own territory; but these again are catch phrases which do not bear very close examination." France has owned neither a Michael Angelo nor a Rubens, a Dante nor a Shakespeare, a Galileo nor a Newton, a Mozart nor a Rossini. As to military glory, before Napoleon, who was a Corsican, vanquished the armies of disunited and distracted Germany, the military annals of France offered a long series of such crushing defeats as Cressy, Poictiers, Agincourt, Pavia, Blenheim, Ramillies, Malplaquet, Oudenarde and Rosbach, only checkered, here and there, by a few easy triumphs over weak neighbors, or by noisy internecine struggles, so that nowaday partisans of the white flag are reduced to boasting over the one victory of Fontenoy, which was gained not by a Frenchman, but by Marshal Saxe, a German. Turning now to moral influence, we see that whereas an Englishman finds his language, literature, and institutions thriving over a third of the globe, and whereas Spaniards, Portuguese, Dutchmen, and Germans can point to prosperous settlements of their founding in North and South America, Africa, and Australia, Frenchmen have done so little to propagate their name and customs by colonizing, that Algeria itself would retain not a trace of them if once the garrisons were removed. To be sure these circumstances

need not constitute a reason why we English should be indifferent to the French, but they make us wonder why such a comparatively inferior nation should arouse so much more attention than ourselves, as they undoubtedly do. Great as our own power, and successful as our own institutions may be, we, as Englishmen, cannot be in perpetual adoration before them; but that foreign states should rank us rather below than on a line with the French, and should have done so from time immemorial, both when France reared her head and crowed and when she lay bruised under our feet, is a mysterious thing which can only be accounted for by seeking the causes of France's popularity outside her actual achievements or deserts.

But we need not search far. Frenchmen owe their popularity not so much to their qualities as to their defects, though it should be noticed that their defects, being exempt from hypocrisy, often wear an honester look than other people's virtues. If the French affected British propriety, German gravity, Spanish superciliousness, or if they were servile as the Italians, we might speak in severe terms of their ungovernable natures, their inordinate bumptiousness, factiousness, and immorality. But how be angry with men who are the first to laugh at their own vices, and who yet retain self-respect enough to show that they think none the worse of themselves for being sinners? It is in this inner consciousness of innocence that lies the great charm of the French; they do wrong, but there is such a smiling candor in their waywardness that it disarms censure. British and German vice is an ugly thing because it is underhand and cloaked with a pretence of respectability which renders it doubly offensive. If we look at a crowd of young English people disporting themselves loosely in a casino, we see at once by their constrained attitudes or by their boisterous gayety that they are ill at ease and trying to stifle the prickings of their consciences which tell them that they are misbehaving themselves. Some, perhaps, are cynically dissolute, but the majority are ashamed of themselves, and will slink away from the place of riot, dreading to be seen, and consequently throwing upon themselves and their dissipation an air wholly disreputable. In the same way a young Spaniard who stalks off grandly from a house of debauchery to pay his orisons at the shrine of his patron saint, and who, in speaking to a tailor whose bill he does not intend to pay, adopts a tone of grandiloquent haughtiness, is a grotesque creature exciting little sympathy. But a Frenchman who laughingly brags that he has got the better of his tailor, and French people of both sexes who revel at casinos, are all in their ways funny and seductive; because there is not one among them, man or woman, but feels that his or her mission in this life is amusement, and that there is no reason to make a secret of the matter. Viewed in this light Frenchmen occupy towards the rest of the world the position filled in private circles by those merry, bright-witted rakes who, with impunity, do and say things for which steadier persons would be ostracised. They are in fact the spoiled children of this earth, whom we love in our own despite, and towards whose extravagances, political and social, we shall always feel indulgently. We do not envy them their institutions, and often, aloud, we thank Heaven that we are not as these men are; but, inwardly, we rejoice that there should be a nation ever ready to put our own unspoken thoughts into words, and to fling stones for us at the many fallacies, humbugs, and prejudices which we dare not assail ourselves. In this respect the encouragements we bestow on the French resemble not only the kindness we cherish for rakes, but also the patronage which noblemen of old used to vouchsafe to court jesters, whom they egged on to say spiteful things and to play pranks against big people who could not be molested otherwise. If the jester was whipped for his pains, the nobles put on a virtuous expression which seemed to say that he had quite deserved it; and so we, when the French have got into trouble through trying, with our warm approval, to effect something, say a revolution or the establishment of a republic, which we have not the slightest desire to see attempted on our shores-so we moralize finely over their failure and