Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, No. 359, September 1845

by Various

MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN.

Part XIX.

"Have I not in my time heard lions roar? Have I not heard the sea, puft up with wind, Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat? Have I not heard great ordnance in the field, And Heaven's artillery thunder in the skies? Have I not in the pitched battle heard Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?" Shakspeare.

Change is the master-spirit of Europe, as permanency is of Asia. The contrast is in the nature of things. However the caprice, the genius, or the necessities, of the sitter on the throne may attempt to impress permanency on the habits of the West, or mutability on those of the East, his success must be but partial. In Europe we have a perpetual movement of minds, a moral ocean, to which tides and currents are an operation of nature. But the Caspian or the Euxine is not more defined by its limits of rock and mountain, or more inexorably separated from the general influx of the waters which roll round the world, than the Asiatic mind is from following the free course, and sharing the bold and stormy innovations, of Europe.

But the most rapid and total change within human memory, was the one which was now before my eye. I felt as some of the old alchymists might feel in their laboratories, with all their crucibles heating, all their alembics boiling, all their strange materials in full effervescence; and their eyes fixed in doubt, and perhaps in awe, on the powerful and hazardous products about to result from combinations untried before, and amalgams which might shatter the roof above their heads, or extinguish their existence by a blast of poison.

I had left Paris Democracy. I found it a Despotism. I had left it a melancholy prey to the multitude; a startling scene of alternate fury and dejection; of cries for revenge, and supplications for bread; of the tyranny of the mob, and the misery of the nation. I now found it the most striking contrast to that scene of despair;—Paris the headquarters of a military government; the Tuileries the palace of a conqueror; every sound martial; the eye dazzled every where by the spoils of the German and Italian sovereignties; the nation flushed with victory. Still, the public aspect exhibited peculiarities which interested me the more, that they could never have appeared in older times, and probably will never return. In the midst of military splendour there was a wild, haggard, and unhappy character stamped on all things. The streets of the capital had not yet felt the influence of that imperial taste which was to render it an imperial city. I saw the same shattered suburbs, the same deep, narrow, and winding streets, the same dismal lanes; in which I had witnessed so often the gatherings of the armed multitude, and which seemed made for popular commotion. Mingled with those wild wrecks and gloomy places of refuge, rather than dwellings, I saw, with their ancient ornaments, and even with their armorial bearings and gilded shields and spears not yet entirely defaced, the palaces of the noblesse and blood-royal of France, the remnants of those ten centuries of monarchy which had been powerful enough to reduce the bold tribes of the Franks to a civilized slavery, and glittering enough to make them in love with their chains. If I could have imagined, in the nineteenth century, a camp of banditti on its most showy scale—a government of Condottieri with its most famous captain at its head—every where a compilation of arms and spoils, the rude habits of the robber combined with the pomp of military triumph—I should have said that the realization was before me.

The Palais Royal was still the chief scene of all Parisian vitality. But the mob orators were to be found there no more. The walks and cafés were now crowed with bold figures, epauleted and embroidered, laughing and talking with the easy air of men who felt themselves masters, and who evidently regarded every thing round them as the furnishing of a camp. The land had now undergone its third stage of that great spell by which nations are urged and roused at the will of a few. The crosier was the first wand of the magician, then came the sceptre—we were now under the spell of the sword. I was delighted at this transformation of France, from the horrid form of popular domination to the showy supremacy of soldiership. It still had its evils. But the guillotine had disappeared. Savage hearts and sanguinary hands no longer made the laws, and executed them. Instead of the groans and execrations, the cries of rage and clamours of despair, which once echoed through all the streets, I now heard only popular songs and dances, and saw all the genuine evidences of that rejoicing with which the multitude had thrown off the most deadly of all tyrannies—its own.

The foreigner shapes every thing into the picturesque, and all his picturesque now was military. Every regiment which passed through Paris on its way from the frontier was reviewed, in front of the palace, by the First Consul; and those reviews formed the finest of all military spectacles, for each had a character and a history of its own.—The regiment which had stormed the bridge of Lodi; the regiment which had headed the assault on the tête-du-pont at Mantua; the regiment which had led the march at the passage of the St Bernard; the regiment which had formed the advance of Dessaix at Marengo—all had their separate distinctions, and were received with glowing speeches and appropriate honours by the chief of the state. The popular vanity was flattered by a perpetual pageant, and that pageant wholly different from the tinsel displays of the monarchy: no representation of legends, trivial in their origin, and ridiculous in their memory; but the revival of transactions in which every man of France felt almost a personal interest, which were the true sources of the new system of nations, and whose living actors were seen passing, hour after hour, before the national eye. All was vivid reality, where all had been false glitter in the days of the Bourbons, and all sullenness and fear in the days of the Democracy. The reality might still be rough and stern, but it was substantial, and not without its share of the superb; it had the sharpness and weight, and it had also the shining, of the sabre. But this was not all; nothing could be more subtly consecutive than the whole progress of the head of the government. In a more superstitious age, it might have been almost believed that some wizard had stood by his cradle, and sung his destiny; or that, like the greatest creation of the greatest of dramatists, he had been met in some mountain pass, or on some lonely heath, and had heard the weird sisters predicting his charmed supremacy. At this period he was palpably training the republic to the sight of a dictatorship. The return of the troops through Paris had already accustomed the populace to the sight of military power.

The movement of vast masses of men by a word, the simplicity of the great military machine, its direct obedience to the master-hand, and its tremendous strength—all were a continued lesson to the popular mind. I looked on the progress of this lesson with infinite interest; for I thought that I as about to see a new principle of government disclosed on the broadest scale—Republicanism in its most majestic aspect, giving a new development of the art of ruling men, and exhibiting a shape of domination loftier and more energetic than the world had ever yet seen. Still, I was aware of the national weaknesses. I was not without a strong suspicion of the hazard of human advance when entrusted to the caprice of any being in the form of man, and, above all, to a man who had won his way to power by arms. Yet, I thought that society had here reached a point of division; a ridge, from which the streams of power naturally took different directions; that the struggles of the democracy were but like the bursting of those monsoons which mark the distinction of seasons in the East; or the ruggedness of those regions of rock and precipice, of roaring torrent and sunless valley, through which the Alpine traveller must toil, before he can bask in the luxuriance of the Italian plain. Attached as I am in the highest degree to the principle of monarchy, and regarding it as the safest anchorage of the state, still, how was I to know that moral nature might not have her reserves of power, as well as physical; that the science of government itself might not have its undetected secrets, as well as the caverns of the earth; that the quiverings and convulsions of society at this moment, obviously alike beyond calculation and control, might not be only evidences of the same vast agencies at work, whose counterparts, in depths below the human eye, shake and rend the soil? Those were the days of speculation, and I indulged in them like the rest of the world. Every man stood, as the islander of the South Sea may stand on his shore, contemplating the conflict of fire and water, while the furnaces of the centre are forcing up the island in clouds of vapour and gusts of whirlwind. All was strange, undefined, and startling. One thing alone seemed certain; that the past régime was gone, never to return; that a great barrier had suddenly been dropped between the two sovereignties; that the living generation stood on the dividing pinnacle between the languid vices of the past system and the daring, perhaps guilty, energies of the system to come. Behind man lay the long level of wasted national faculties, emasculating superstitions, the graceful feebleness of a sensual nobility, and the superb follies of a haughty and yet helpless throne. Before him rose a realm of boundless extent, but requiring frames of vigour, and feelings undismayed by difficulty, to traverse and subdue;—a horizon of hills and clouds, where the gale blew fresh and the tempest rolled; where novel difficulties must be met at every step, but still where, if we trod at all, we must ascend at every step, where every clearing of the horizon must give us a new and more comprehensive prospect, and where every struggle with the rudeness of the soil, or the roughness of the elements, must enhance the vigour of the nerve that encountered them.

Those were dreams; yet I had not then made due allowance for the nature of the foreign mind. I was yet to learn its absence of all sober thought; its ready temptation by every trivially of the hour; its demand of extravagant excitement to rouse it into action, and its utter apathy where its passions were not bribed. I had imagined a national sovereignty, righteous, calm, and resolute, trained by the precepts of a Milton and a Locke; I found only an Italian despotism, trained by the romance of Rousseau and the scepticism of Voltaire.

Every day in the capital now had its celebration, and all exhibited the taste and talent of the First Consul; but one characteristic fête at length woke me to the true design of this extraordinary man—the inauguration of the Legion of Honour. It was the first step to the throne, and a step of incompatible daring and dexterity; it was the virtual restoration of an aristocracy, in the presence of a people who had raved with the rage of frenzy against all titles, who had torn down the coats-of-arms from the gates of the noblesse, and shattered and dug up even the marbles of their sepulchres. A new military caste—a noblesse of the sword—was now to be established. Republicanism had been already "pushed from its stool," but this was the chain which was to keep it fixed to the ground.

The ceremonial was held in the Hotel des Invalides; and all the civil pomp of the consulate was combined with all the military display. The giving of the crosses of honour called forth in succession the names of all those gallant soldiers whose exploits had rung through Europe, in the campaigns of the Alps and the Rhine. Nothing could be more in the spirit of a fine historic picture, or in the semblance of a fine drama. The first men of the French councils and armies stood, surrounded by the monuments of their ancestors in the national glory—the statues of the Condés and Turennes, whose memory formed so large a portion of the popular pride, and whose achievements so solid a record in the history of French triumph. To those high sources of sentiment, all that could be added by stately decoration and religious solemnity was given; and in the chorus of sweet voices, the sounds of martial harmony, the acclamations of the countless multitudes within and without, and the thunder of cannon, was completed the most magnificent, and yet the most ominous, of all ceremonials. It was not difficult to see, that this day was the consecration of France to absolute power, and of all her faculties to conquest. Like the Roman herald, she had put on, in the temple, the robe of defiance to all nations. She was to be from this day of devotement the nation of war. It was less visible, but not less true, that upon the field of Marengo perished the Democracy, but in that temple was sacrificed the Republic. The throne was still only in vision; but its outline was clear, and that outline was colossal.

In my intercourse with the men of the new régime I had associated chiefly with the military. Their ideas were less narrowed by the circle of Paris, their language was frank and free, and their knowledge was more direct and extensive on the topic which I most desired to comprehend, the state of their foreign conquests. I soon had reason to congratulate myself on my choice. One of these, a colonel of dragoons, who had served with Moreau, and whose partialities at least did not lean to the rival hero, came hurriedly to me at an early hour one morning, to "take his leave." But why, and where? "He was ordered to join his regiment immediately, and march for the coast of the Channel." "To invade us?" I asked laughingly. "Not exactly yet, perhaps; but it may come to that in good time. I grieve to tell you," added my gallant friend, with more of gravity than I thought he could possibly have thrown into his good-humoured features, "that we are to have war. The matter is perfectly determined in the Tuileries; and at the levee to-day there will probably be a scene. In the mean time, take my information as certain, and be prepared for your return to England without twenty-four hours' delay." He took his departure.

I attended the levee on that memorable day, and saw the scene. The Place du Carrousel was unusually crowded with troops, which the First Consul was passing in review. The whole population seemed to have conjectured the event of the day; for I had never seen them in such numbers, or with such an evident look of general anxiety. The Tuileries were filled with officers of state, with leading military men, and members of the Senate and Tribunat; the whole body of the foreign ambassadors were present; and yet the entire assemblage was kept waiting until the First Consul had inspected even the firelocks of his guard, and the shoes in their knapsacks. The diplomatists, as they saw from the high casements of the palace this tardy operation going on, exchanged glaces with each other at its contemptuous trifling. Some of the militaires exhibited the impatience of men accustomed to prompt measures; the civilians smiled and shrugged their shoulders; but all felt that there was a purpose in the delay.

At length, the drums beat for the close of the review; the First Consul galloped up to the porch of the palace, flung himself from his charger, sprang up the staircase, and without stopping for etiquette, rushed into the salle, followed by cloud of aides-de-camp and chamberlains. The Circle of Presentations was formed, and he walked hastily round it, saying few rapid words to each. I observed for the first time an aide-de-camp moving on the outside of the circle, step for step, and with his eye steadily marking the gesture of each individual to whom the First Consul spoke in his circuit. This was a new precaution, and indicative of the time. Till then he had run all risks, and might have been the victim of any daring hand. The very countenance of the First Consul was historic; it was as characteristic as his career. It exhibited the most unusual contrast of severity and softness; nothing sterner than the gathering of his brow, nothing more flattering than his smile. On this occasion we had them both in perfection. To the general diplomatic circle his lip wore the smile. But when he reached the spot where the British ambassador stood, we had the storm at once. With his darkest frown, and with every feature in agitation, he suddenly burst out into a tirade against England—reproaching her with contempt of treaties; with an absolute desire for war; with a perpetual passion for embroiling Europe; with forming armaments in the midst of peace; and with challenging France to an encounter which must provoke universal hostilities. The English ambassador listened in silence, but with the air of a high-spirited man, who would concede nothing to menace; and with the countenance of an intelligent one, who could have easily answered declamation by argument. But for this answer there was no time. The First Consul, having delivered his diatribe, suddenly sprang round, darted through the crowd, rushed through a portal, and was lost to the view. That scene was decisive. I saw that war was inevitable. I took my friend's advice, ordered post-horses, and within the twenty-four hours I saw with infinite delight the cliffs of Dover shining in the dawn.

I am not writing a history. I am merely throwing together events separated by great chasms, in the course of a life. My life was all incident; sometimes connected with public transactions of the first magnitude, sometimes wholly personal; and thus I hasten on to the close of a public career which has ended, and of an existence diversified by cloud and sunshine, but on the whole happy.

The war began; it was unavoidable. The objects of our great adversary have been since stripped of their disguise. His system, at the time, was to lull England by peace, until he had amassed a force which would crush her at the outbreak of a war. A few years would have concentrated his strength, and brought the battle to our own shores. But there are higher impulses acting on the world than human ambition; the great machine is not altogether guided by man. England had the cause of nations in her charge; her principles were truth, honour, and justice. She had retained the reverence of her forefathers for the Sanctuary; and the same guidance which had in the beginning taught her wisdom, ultimately crowned her with victory. I lived through a period of the most overwhelming vicissitudes of nations, and of the great disturber himself, who had caused those vicissitudes. I saw Napoleon at the head of 500,000 men on the Niemen; I saw him reduced to 50,000 on the plains of Champagne; I saw him reduced to a brigade at Fontainebleau; I saw him a burlesque of empire at Elba; and I saw him an exile on board a British ship, departing from Europe to obscurity and his grave. These things may well reconcile inferior talents to the changes of fortune. But they should also teach nations, that the love of conquest is national ruin; and that there is a power which avenges the innocent blood. No country on earth requires that high moral more than France; and no country on earth has more bitterly suffered for its perversion. Napoleon was embodied France; the concentrated spirit of her wild ambition, of her furious love of conquest, of her reckless scorn of the sufferings and rights of mankind. Nobler principles have followed, under a wiser rule. But if France draws the sword again in the ambition of Napoleon, she will exhibit to the world only the fate of Napoleon. It will be her last war.

On my arrival in England, I found the public mind clouded with almost universal dejection. Pitt was visibly dying. He still held the nominal reins of government for some period; but the blow had been struck, and his sole honour now was to be, that, like the Spartan of old, he died on the field, and with his buckler on his arm. There are secrets in the distribution of human destinies, which have always perplexed mankind; and one of those is, why so many of the most powerful minds have been cut off in the midst of their career, extinguished at the moment when their fine faculties were hourly more essential to the welfare of science, of government, and of the general progress of society.

I may well comprehend that feeling, for it was my own. I saw Pitt laid in the grave; I looked down into the narrow bed where slept all that was mortal of the man who virtually wielded the whole supremacy of Europe. Yet how little can man estimate the future! Napoleon was in his glory, when Pitt was in his shroud. Yet how infinitely more honoured, and thus more happy, was the fate of him by whose sepulchre all that was noble and memorable in the living generation stood in reverence and sorrow, than the last hour of the prisoner of St Helena! Both were emblems of their nations. The Englishman, manly, pure, and bold, of unshaken firmness, of proud reliance on the resources of his own nature, and of lofty perseverence through good and through evil fortune. The foreigner, dazzling and daring, of singular intellectual vividness, and of a thirst of power which disdained to be slaked but at sources above the ambition of all the past warriors and statesmen of Europe. He was the first who dreamed of fabricating anew the old Roman sceptre, and establishing an empire of the world. His game was for a prodigious stake, and for a while he played it with prodigious fortune. He found the moral atmosphere filled with the floating elements of revolution; he collected the republican electricity, and discharged it on the cusps and pinnacles of the European thrones with terrible effect. But, from the moment when he had dissipated that charm, he lost the secret of his irresistible strength. As the head of the great republic, making opinion his precursor, calling on the old wrongs of nations to level his way, and marshaling the new-born hopes, the ancient injuries, and the ardent imaginations of the continental kingdoms to fight his battles; the world lay before him, with all its barriers ready to fall at the first tread of his horse's hoof. As an Emperor, he forged his own chain.

Napoleon, the chieftain of republicanism, might have revolutionized Europe; Napoleon, the monarch, narrowed his supremacy to the sweep of his sword. Like a necromancer weary of his art, he scattered the whole treasury of his magnificent illusions into "thin air;" flung away his creative wand for a sceptre; and buried the book of his magic "ten thousand fathom deep," to replace it only by the obsolete statutes of courts, and the weak etiquette of governments in decay. Fortunate for mankind that he committed this irrecoverable error, and was content to be the lord of France, instead of being the sovereign of opinion; for his nature was despotic, and his power must have finally shaped and massed itself into a stupendous tyranny. Still, he might have long influenced the fates, and long excited the awe and wonder, of Europe. We, too, might have worshipped his Star, and have forgotten the danger of the flaming phenomenon, in the rapidity and eccentricity of its course, as we saw it eclipsing the old luminaries in succession; until it touched our orbit, and visited us in conflagration.

It was said that Pitt died of a broken heart, in despair of the prospects of England. The defeat of Austerlitz was pronounced his death-blow. What thoughts may cluster round the sleepless pillow, who shall tell? But no man knew England better; none had a bolder faith in her perseverance and principle; none had more broadly laid the foundations of victory in national honour. I shall never be driven into the belief that William Pitt despaired of his country.

He died in the vigour of his genius, in the proudest struggle of the empire, in the midst of the deepest trial which for a thousand years had demanded all the faculties of England. Yet, what man within human recollection had lived so long, if we are to reckon life not by the calendar but by triumphs? What minister of England, what minister of Europe, but himself, was the head of his government for three-and-twenty years? What man had attained so high an European rank? What mind had influenced so large an extent of European interests? What name was so instinctively pronounced by every nation, as the first among mankind? To have earned distinctions like these, was to have obtained all that time could give. Not half a century in years, Pitt's true age was patriarchal.

I was now but a spectator. My connexion with public life was broken off. Every name with which I had been associated was swept away; and I stood like a man flung from ship-wreck upon a shore, where every face which he met was that of a stranger. I was still in Parliament, but I felt a loathing for public exertions. From habit, I had almost identified office with the memorable men whom I had seen governing so long; and the new faces, the new declamation, and the new principles, which the ministerial change brought before me nightly, startled my feelings even less as new than as incongruous. I admitted the ability, the occasional intelligence, and perhaps even the patriotism of the cabinet; but in those reveries, (the natural refuge from a long debate,) memory so often peopled the Treasury Bench with the forms of Pitt and his distinguished coadjutors, and so completely filled my ear with his sonorous periods and high-toned principles, that when I was roused to the reality, I felt as those who have seen some great performer in one of Shakspeare's characters, until no excellence of his successor can embody the conception once more.

I retired from the tumult of London, and returned to tastes which I had never wholly forgotten; taking a small residence within a few miles of this centre of the living world, and devoting my leisure to the enjoyments of that life, which, in the purest days of man, was given to him as the happiest, "to dress the garden, and keep it." Clotilde in all her tastes joined with mine, or rather led them, with the instinctive elegance of a female mind, accomplished in every grace of education. We read, wrote, walked, talked, and pruned our rose-trees and gathered our carnations and violets, together. She had already given me those pledges, which, while they increase the anxiety, also increase the affection, of wedded life. The education of our children was a new source of interest. They were handsome and healthy. Their little sports, the growth of their young perceptions, and the freshness of their ideas, renewed to us both all the delights of society without their exhaustion; and when, after returning from a day spent in the noise and bustle of London, I reached my rustic gate, heard the cheerful voices of the little population which rushed down the flowery avenue to cling upon my neck; and stood at the door of my cottage, with my arm round the waist of my beautiful and fond wife, breathing the evening fragrance of a thousand blooms, and enjoying the cool air, and the purple glories of the sky—I often wondered why men should seek for happiness in any other scene; and felt gratitude, not the less sincere for its being calm and solemn, to the Giver of a lot so nearly approaching to human fulness of joy.

But the world rolls on, let who will slumber among its roses. The political world was awoke by a thunder-clap. Fox died. He was just six months a minister! Such is ambition, such is the world. He died, like Pitt, in the zenith of his powers, with his judgment improved and his passions mitigated, with the noblest prospects of public utility before his eyes, and the majestic responsibilities of a British minister assuming their natural rank in his capacious mind. The times, too, were darkening; and another "lodestar" was thus stricken from the national hemisphere, at the moment when the nation most wanted guidance. The lights which remained were many; but they were vague, feeble, and scattered. The "leader of the starry host" was gone.

I cannot trust myself to speak of this distinguished man; for I was no Foxite. I regarded his policy in opposition as the pleadings of a powerful advocate, with a vast retaining fee, a most comprehensive cause, and a most generous and confiding client. Popularity, popular claims, and the people, were all three made for him beyond all other men; and no advocate ever pleaded with more indefatigable zeal, or more resolute determination. But, raised to a higher position, higher qualities were demanded. Whether they might not have existed in his nature, waiting for the development of time, is the question. But time was not given. His task had hitherto been easy. It was simply to stand as a spectator on the shore, criticising the manœuvres of a stately vessel struggling with the gale. The helm was at last put into his hand; and it was then that he felt the difference between terra firma and the wild and restless element which he was now to control. But he had scarcely set his foot on the deck, when he, too, was swept away. On such brevity of trial, it is impossible to judge. Time might have matured his vigour, while it expanded his views: matchless as the leader of a party, he might then have been elevated into the acknowledged leader of a people. The singular daring, ardent sensitiveness, and popular ambition, which made him dangerous in a private station, might then have found their nobler employment, and been purified in the broad and lofty region of ministerial duty. He might have enlarged the partizan into the patriot, and, instead of being the great leader of a populace, have been ennobled into the great guide of an empire.

But the world never stands still. On the day when I returned from moralising on the vanity of life over the grave of Fox, I received a letter, a trumpet-call to the mêlée, from Mordecai. It was enthusiastic, but its enthusiasm had now taken a bolder direction. "In abandoning England," he told me, "he had abandoned all minor and personal speculations, and was now dealing with the affairs of kingdoms." This letter gave only fragments of his views; but it was easy to see that he contemplated larger results than he ventured to trust to paper.

"You must come and see me here," said he, "for it is only here that you can see me as I ever desired to be seen; or in fact, as nature made me. In your busy metropolis, I was only one of the millions who were content to make a sort of a reptile existence, creeping on the ground, and living on the chances of the day. Here I have thrown off my caterpillar life and am on the wing—a human dragon-fly, if you will, darting at a thousand different objects, enjoying the broad sunshine, and speeding through the wide air. My invincible attachment to my nation here finds its natural object; for the sons of Abraham are here a people. I am a patriarch, with my flocks and herds, my shepherds and clansmen, the sons of my tribe coming to do me honour, and my heart swelling and glowing with the prospects of national regeneration. I have around me a province to which one of your English counties would be but a sheepfold; a multitude of bold spirits, to whom your populace would be triflers; a new nation, elated by their approaching deliverance, solemnly indignant at their past oppression, and determined to shake the land to its centre, or to recover their freedom.

"You will speak of this as the vision of an old man—come to us, and you will see it a splendid reality. But observe, that I expect no miracle. I leave visions to fanatics; and while I acknowledge the Power of Powers, which rides in clouds, and moves the world by means unknown to human weakness, I look also to the human means which have their place in pushing on the wheels of the great system. The army which has broken down the strength of the Continent—the force which, like a whirlwind, has torn such tremendous chasms through the old domains of European power, and has torn up so many of the forest monarchs by the root—the French legions, the greatest instrument of human change since the Gothic invasions, are now marching direct on Poland.

"I have seen the man who is at the head of that army—the most extraordinary being whom Europe has seen for a thousand years—the crowned basilisk of France. I own, that we must beware of his fangs, of the blast of his nostrils, and the flash of his eye. He is a terrible production of nature: but he is on our side, and, even if he should be finally trampled, he will have first done our work. I have had an interview with Napoleon! it was long and animated. He spoke to me as to the chief man of my nation, and I answered him in the spirit of the chief man. He pronounced, that the general change, essential to the true government of Europe, was incapable of being effected without the aid of our people. He spoke contemptuously of the impolicy by which we had been deprived of our privileges, and declared his determination to place us on a height from which we might move the world. But it was obvious to me, that under those lofty declarations there was a burning ambition; that if we were to move the world, it was for him; and that, even then, we were not to move it for the monarch of France, but for the individual. I saw, that he was then the dreamer. Yet his dream was the extravagance of genius. In those hopeless graspings and wild aspirations, I saw ultimate defeat; but I saw also the nerve and muscle of a gigantic mind. In his pantings after immeasurable power and imperishable dominion, he utterly forgot the barrier which time throws before the proudest step of human genius; and that within a few years his head must grow grey, his blood cold, the sword be returned to its sheath, and even the sceptre fall from his withering hand. Still, in our conference, we both spoke the same language of scorn for human obstacles, of contempt for the narrowness of human views, and of our resolution to effect objects which, in many an after age, should fix the eye of the world. But he spoke of immortal things; relying on mortal conjecture and mortal power. I spoke of them on surer grounds. I felt them to be the consummation of promises which nothing can abolish; to be the offspring of power which nothing can resist. The foundation of his structures was policy, the foundation of mine was prophecy. And when his shall be scattered as the chaff of the threshing-floor, and be light as the dust of the balance; mine shall be deep as the centre, high as the heavens, and dazzling as the sun in his glory."

In another portion of his letter, he adverted to the means by which this great operation was to be effected.

"I have been for three days on the Vistula, gazing at the march of the 'Grand Army.' It well deserves the name. It is the mightiest mass of power ever combined under one head; half a million of men. The armies of Persia were gatherings of clowns compared to this incomparable display of soldiership; the armies of Alaric and Attila were hordes of savages in comparison; the armies of ancient Rome alone approached it in point of discipline, but the most powerful Roman army never reached a fifth of its number. I see at this moment before me the conquerors of the Continent, the brigades which have swept Italy, the bayonets and cannon which have broken down Austria, and extinguished Prussia.—The eagles are now on the wing for a mightier prey."

This prediction was like the prayers of the Homeric heroes—

"One half the gods dispersed in empty air."

Poland was not to be liberated; the crisis was superb, but the weapon was not equal to the blow. It was the first instance in which the French Emperor was found inferior to his fortune. With incomparable force of intellect, Napoleon wanted grandeur of mind. It has become the custom of later years to deny him even superiority of intellect; but the man who, in a contest open to all, goes before all—who converts a republic, with all its ardour, haughtiness, and passion, into a monarchy at once as rigid and as magnificent as an Oriental despotism—who, in a country of warriors, makes himself the leading warrior—who, among the circle within circle of the subtlest political intrigues, baffles all intrigues, converts them into the material of his own ascendency, and makes the subtlest and the boldest spirits his instruments and slaves—has given sufficient evidence of the superiority of his talents. The conqueror who beat down in succession all the great military names of Europe, must have been a soldier; the negotiator who vanquished all existing diplomacy, and the statesman who remodelled the laws, curbed the fiery temper, and reduced to discipline the fierce insubordination of a people, whose first victory had crushed the state, and heaped the ruins of the throne on the sepulchre of their king—must have been a negotiator and a statesman of the first rank. Or, if those were not the achievements of intellect, by what were they done? If they were done without it, of what value is intellect? Napoleon had then only found the still superior secret of success; and we deny his intellect, simply to give him attributes higher than belong to human nature.—No man before him dreamed of such success, no man in his day rivalled it, no man since his day has attempted its renewal. "But he was fortunate!" What can be more childish than to attempt the solution of the problem by fortune? Fortune is a phantom. Circumstances may arise beyond the conception of man; but where the feebler mind yields to circumstances, the stronger one shapes, controls, and guides them.

This man was sent for a great purpose of justice, and he was gifted with the faculties for its execution. An act of imperial guilt had been committed, of which Europe was to be purged by penalty alone. The fall of Poland was to be made a moral to the governments of the earth; and Napoleon was to be the fiery brand that was to imprint the sentence upon the foreheads of the great criminals. It is in contemplations like these, that the Spirit of history ministers to the wisdom of mankind. Whatever may be the retribution for individuals beyond the grave, justice on nations must be done in this world; and here it will be done.

The partition of Poland was the most comprehensive and audacious crime of the modern world. It was a deliberate insult, at once to the laws of nations and to the majesty of the great Disposer of nations. And never fell vengeance more immediate, more distinct, or more characteristic. The capital of Austria twice entered over the bodies of its gallant soldiery; Russia ravaged and Moscow burnt; the Prussian army extinguished by the massacre of Jena, and Prussia in a day fettered for years—were the summary and solemn retribution of Heaven. But, when the penalty was paid, the fate of the executioner instantly followed. Guilt had punished guilt, and justice was to be alike done upon all. Napoleon and his empire vanished, as the powder vanishes that explodes the mine. The ground was broken up; the structures of royalty on its surface were deeply fractured; the havoc was complete; but the fiery deposit which had effected the havoc was itself scattered into air.

His re-establishment of Poland would have been an act of grandeur. It would have established a new character for the whole Revolution. It would have shown that the new spirit which had gone forth summoning the world to regeneration, was itself regeneration; that it was not a tempter, but a restorer; that all conquest was not selfish, and all protestation not meant to deceive. If Napoleon had given Poland a diadem, and placed it on the brow of Kosciusko, he would, in that act, have placed on his own brow a diadem which no chance of the field could have plucked away; an imperishable and dazzling answer to all the calumnies of his age, and all the doubts of posterity. He might even have built, in the restoration of the fallen kingdom, a citadel for his own security in all the casualties of empire; but, in all events, he would have fixed in the political heaven a star which, to the last recollection of mankind, would have thrown light on his sepulchre, and borne his name.

The fall of the Foxite ministry opened the way to a new cabinet, and I resumed my office. But we marched in over ruins. In the short period of their power, Europe had been shattered. England had stood aloof and escaped the shock; but to stand aloof then was her crime—her sympathy might have saved the tottering system. Now, all was gone. When we looked over the whole level of the Continent, we saw but two thrones—France and Russia; all the rest were crushed. They stood, but their structure was shattered, stripped of its adornments, and ready to crumble down at the first blow. England was without an ally. We had begun the war with Europe in our line of battle; we now stood alone. Yet, the spirit of the nation was never bolder than in this hour, when a storm of hostility seemed to be gathering round us from every quarter of the world. Still, there were voices of ill omen among our leading men. It was said, that France and Russia had resolved to divide the world between them—to monopolize the East and the West; to extinguish all the minor sovereignties; to abolish all the constitutions; to turn the world into two vast menageries, in which the lesser monarchies should be shown, as caged lions, for the pomp of the two lords-paramount of the globe. I heard this language from philosophers, from orators, even from statesmen; but I turned to the people, and I found the spirit of their forefathers unshaken in them still—the bold defiance of the foreigner, the lofty national scorn of his gasconading, the desire to grapple more closely with his utmost strength, and the willingness, nay, the passionate desire, to rest the cause of Europe on their championship alone. I never heard among the multitude a sound of that despair which had become the habitual language of Opposition. They had answered the call to arms with national ardour. The land was filled with voluntary levies, and the constant cry of the people was—conflict with the enemy, any where, at any time, or upon any terms. More fully versed in their national history than any other European people, they remembered, that in every war with France, for a thousand years, England had finished with victory; that she had never suffered any one decisive defeat in the war, that where the forces of the two nations could come fairly into contact, their troops had always been successful; and that from the moment when France ventured to contest the empire of the seas, all the battles of England were triumphs, until the enemy was swept from the ocean.

The new cabinet formed its plans on the national confidence, and executed them with statesmanlike decision. The struggle on the Continent was at an end; but they resolved to gird it with a chain of fire. Every port was shut up by English guns; every shore was watched by English eyes. Outside this chain, the world was our own. The ocean was free; every sea was traversed by our commerce with as much security as in the most profound peace. The contrast with the Continent was of the most striking order. There all was the dungeon—one vast scene of suffering and outcry; of coercion and sorrow; the conscription, the confiscation, the licensed plunder, the bitter and perpetual insult. The hearts of men died within them, and they crept silently to their obscure graves. Wounds, poverty, and ferocious tyranny, the heart-gnawing pangs of shame, and the thousand thorns which national and conscious degradation strews on the pillow of men crushed by the insolence of a soldiery, wore away the human race; provinces were unpeopled, and a generation were laid prematurely in the grave.

The recollections of the living world will long point to this period as the most menacing portion of all history. The ancient tyrannies were bold, presumptuous, and remorseless monopolies of power; but their pressure scarcely descended to the multitude. It crushed the senator, the patrician, and the man of opulence; as the tempest smites the turrets of the palace, or shatters the pinnacles of the mountain range. But the despotism of France searched the humblest condition of man. It tyrannized over the cottage, as fiercely as it had swept over the thrones. The German or Italian peasant saw his son torn away, to perish in some distant region, of which he knew no more than that it was the grave of the thousands and tens of thousands of his fellow shepherds and vintagers. The despotism of France less resembled the domination of man, from which, with all its vigilance, there is some hope of escape, than the subtlety of a demon, which has an evil and a sting for every heart, and by which nothing can be forgotten, and nothing will be spared. In the whole immense circle of French dominion, no man could lay his head down to rest, with a security that he might not be roused at midnight, to be flung into a captivity from which he was never to return. No man could look upon his property, the earnings of his manhood, the resource for his age, or the provision for his children, without the knowledge that it was at the mercy of the plunderer; no man could look upon the birth of his child, without the bitter consciousness that another victim was preparing for the general sacrifice; nor could see the ripening form or intellect of those who were given to him by Providence for the comfort and companionship of his advancing years, without a conviction that they would be swept away from him. He felt that he would be left unsheltered and alone; and that those in whom his life was wrapt, and whom he would have gladly given his life to save, were destined to perish by some German or Russian bayonet, and make their last bed among the swamps of the Danube or the snows of Poland.

I am not now speaking from the natural abhorrence of the Briton for tyranny alone. The proofs are before the eye of mankind. Within little more than half the first year of the Polish campaign, three conscriptions, of eighty thousand youths each, were demanded from France alone. Two hundred and forty thousand living beings were torn from their parents, and sent to perish in the field, the hospital, and on the march through deserts where winter reigns in boundless supremacy!

Let the man of England rejoice that those terrible inflictions cannot be laid on him, and be grateful to the freedom which protects the most favoured nation of mankind. Arbitrary arrest and the conscription are the two heads of the serpent—either would embitter the existence of the most prosperous state of society; they both at this hour gnaw the vitals of the continental states; they alienate the allegiance, and chill the affections; even where they are mitigated by the character of the sovereigns, they still remain the especial evils which the noblest patriotism should apply all its efforts to extinguish, and the removal of which it would be the most illustrious boon of princes to confer upon their people.

But the ramparts of that empire of slavery and suffering were to be shaken at last. The breach was to be made and stormed by England; Europe was to be summoned to achieve its own deliverance; and England was to move at the head of the proudest armament that ever marched to conquest for the liberties of mankind.

She began by a thunder-clap. The peace with Russia had laid the Czar at the mercy of France. Napoleon had intrigued to make him a confederate in the league against mankind. But the generous nature of the Russian monarch shrank from the conspiracy, and the secret articles of the treaty of Tilsit were divulged to the British cabinet. I shall not now say from what authority they came; but the confidence was spontaneous, and the effect decisive. Those Articles contained the outline of a plan for combining all the fleets of subject Europe, and pouring the final vengeance of war on our shores. The right wing of that tremendous armament was to be formed of the Danish and Russian fleets. This confederacy must be broken up, or we must see a hundred and eighty ships of the line, freighted with a French and Russian army, at the mouth of the Thames. There was not a moment to be lost, if we were to act at all; for a French force was already within a march of the Great Belt, to garrison Denmark. The question was debated in council, in all its bearings. All were fully aware of the hypocritical clamour which would be raised by the men who were lending themselves to every atrocity of France. We were not less prepared for the furious declamation of that professor of universal justice and protector of the rights of neutral nations—the French Emperor. But the necessity was irresistible; the act was one of self-defence; and it was executed accordingly, and with instant and incomparable vigour. A fleet and army were dispatched to the Baltic. An assault of three days gave the Danish fleet into our hands. The confederacy was broken up by the British batteries; and the armament returned, with twenty sail of the enemy's line, as trophies of the best planned and boldest expedition of the war.

Napoleon raged; but it was at finding that England could show a promptitude like his own, sanctioned by a better cause. Denmark complained pathetically of the infringement of peace, before she had "completed her preparations for war;" but every man of political understanding, even in Denmark, rejoiced at her being disburdened of a fleet, whose subsistence impoverished her revenues, and whose employment could only have involved her in fatal hostilities with Britain. Russia was loudest in her indignation, but a smile was mingled with her frown. Her statesmen were secretly rejoiced to be relieved from all share in the fearful enterprise of an encounter with the fleets of England, and her Emperor was not less rejoiced to find, that she had still the sagacity and the courage which could as little be baffled as subdued, and to which the powers of the North themselves might look for refuge in the next struggle of diadems.

This was but the dawning of the day; the sun was soon to rise. Yet, public life has its difficulties in proportion to its height. As Walpole said, that no man knows the human heart but a minister; so no man knows the real difficulties of office, but the man of office. Lures to his passions, temptations to his integrity, and alarms to his fears, are perpetually acting on his sense of honour. To make a false step is the most natural thing in the world under all those impulses; and one false step ruins him. The rumour reached me that there were dissensions in the cabinet; and, though all was smooth to the eye, I had soon sufficient proof that the intelligence was true. A prominent member of the administration was the object of the intrigue. He was an intelligent, high-spirited, and straightforward man, open in language, if the language was not of the most classic order; and bold in his conceptions, if those conceptions were not formed on the most accomplished knowledge. He had attained his high position, partly by public services, but still more by connexion. It was impossible to refuse respect to his general powers, but it was equally impossible to deny the intellectual superiority of his competitor. The contrast which they presented in the House was decisive of their talents for debate. While the one spoke his mind with the uncultured expressions of the moment; the other never addressed the House but with the polished and pointed diction of the orator. He was the most accomplished of debaters.—Always prepared, always pungent, often powerful. Distinguished in early life by scholarship, he had brought all the finer spirit of his studies into the business of public life. He was the delight of the House; and the boundless applause which followed his eloquence, and paid an involuntary tribute to his mastery of public affairs, not unnaturally stimulated his ambition to possess that leading official rank to which he seemed called by the right of nature. The rivalry at length became open and declared; it had been felt too deeply to die away among the casual impressions of public life; it had been suppressed too long to be forgiven on either side; and the crisis was evidently approaching in which it was necessary to take a part with either of those gifted men.

I seldom spent more anxious hours in the course of an anxious life, than during the period of this deliberation. I felt all the fascinations of the man of genius. On the other hand, I respected all the solid and manly qualities of his opponent. In a personal view, the issue of the contest was likely to produce evil to my own views. I was still a dependent upon fortune. I had new ties and interests, which made official income more important to me day by day. In the fall of the administration I must follow the general fate.—In making my decision with the unsuccessful candidate for power, I must go down along with him; and the claims of the competitors were so equally balanced, and both were so distinguished, that it was beyond all conjecture to calculate the result. I, too, was not without many a temptation to perplex my judgment. The rivalry had at length become public, and the friends of each were active in securing opinions among the holders of office. The whole was a lottery, but with my political existence dependent on my escaping a blank. In this dilemma I consulted my oracle, Clotilde. Her quick intelligence decided for me at once. "You must resign," said she. "You value both; you cannot side with either without offending their feelings, or, what I more regard, distressing your own. Both are men of intelligence and honour, and they will understand your motives and respect them. To retain office is impossible."

"But, Clotilde, how can I bear the thought of reducing you and my infants to the discomforts of a narrow income, and the obscurity of a life of retirement?"

"A thousand times better, than you could endure the thought of retaining office against your judgment, or taking a part against a friend. Follow the impressions of your own generous nature, and you will be dearer than ever to Clotilde—even though it condemned us all to the deepest obscurity." Tears gushed into her eyes as she spoke the words; and in her heart she was evidently less of the heroine than in her language: the children had come playing round her feet at the moment; and the family picture of the reverse in our fortunes, filled with this cluster of young faces, unconscious of the chance which lay before them, was too severe a trial for a mother's feelings. Her tears flowed abundantly, and the beating of her heart showed the anguish of her sacrifice. But she still persisted in her determination. As I took leave of her to go down to the House, her last words, as she pressed my hand, were—"Resign, and leave the rest to fortune."

A motion on the subject of the rival claims had been appointed for the evening; and the premier was to open the debate. The House was crowded at an early hour; and as my services were required in the discussion, I postponed the communication of my resolve, until the division should announce that my labours were at an end. But the hour passed away in routine business. Still, the premier did not appear. The anxiety grew excessive. At length whispers ran round the benches, of a rencounter between the two distinguished individuals; and, like all rumours of this nature, the results were pronounced to be of the most alarming kind. The consternation was gradually mitigated by the announcement that one of the combatants remained unhurt, but that the other had received a mortal wound. The House was speedily deserted; and all rushed out to ascertain the truth of this melancholy intelligence. Yet, nothing was to be gathered among the numberless reports of the night, and I returned home harassed almost into fever. The morning quieted the general alarm. The wound was dangerous, but not mortal; and both combatants had sent in their resignation. It was accepted by royalty, and before another night fell; I was sent for by the premier, and offered one of the vacant offices.

Such are the chances of public life. The lottery had been drawn, and mine was a prize. With what feelings I returned on that night to my fireside; with what welcome I was received by my gentle, yet heroic, wife; or with what eyes I glanced upon my infants, as they came to ask the paternal kiss and blessing before they parted for their pillows, I leave to those who know the rejoicing of the heart, to conceive.

Those events had shaken the ministry, as dissensions always have done; and it still cost us many a severe struggle to resist the force of Opposition combined with the clamours of the country. England and France now presented a spectacle unexampled in the annals of hostilities, engaged in a war which seemed interminable—both determined to conquer or perish; both impelled by the most daring courage; yet neither able to inflict the slightest blow upon the other, with but fifteen miles between. France was nearer to Russia, nay, was nearer to the remotest extremity of Asia, than to England. In the midst of the fiercest war, both preserved the attitude of the most profound peace. The lion and the tiger, couching on the opposite sides of some impassable ravine, each watching the fiery eyes and naked fangs of the other, would have been the natural emblems of this hopeless thirst of encounter between the two most powerful and exasperated nations of the earth.

It is no superstition to trace those events to a higher source than man. The conclusion of this vast conflict was already written, in a record above the short-sighted vision and infirm memory of our nature. In all the earlier guilt of Europe, France has been the allotted punisher of the Continent; and England the allotted punisher of France. I make no presumptuous attempt to explain the reason; but the process is incontestable. When private profligacy combines with some atrocious act of public vice to make the crimes of the Continent intolerable, France is sent forth to carry fire and sword to its boundaries, to crush its armies in the field, to sack its cities, and to decimate its population. Then comes the penalty of the punisher. The crimes of France demand purgation. The strength of England is summoned to this stern duty, and France is scourged; her military pride is broken; her power is paralysed, peace follows, and Europe rests for a generation. The process has been so often renewed, and has been completed with such irresistible regularity, that the principle is a law. The period for this consummation was now come once more.

I was sitting in my library one evening, when a stranger was introduced, who had brought a letter from the officer commanding our squadron on the Spanish coast. He was a man of noble presence, of stately stature, and with a countenance exhibiting all the vivid expression of the South. He was a Spanish nobleman from the Asturias, and deputed by the authorities to demand succours in the national rising against the common enemy, Napoleon. I was instinctively struck by the measureless value of resistance in a country which opened to us the whole flank of France; but the intelligence was so wholly unexpected, so entirely beyond calculation, and at the same time so pregnant with the highest results to England, that I was long incredulous. I was prepared to doubt the involuntary exaggeration of men who had every thing at stake; the feverish tone of minds embarked in the most formidable of all struggles; and even the passion of the southern in every event and object, of force sufficient to arouse him into action. But the Asturian was firm in his assurances, clear and consistent in his views, and there was even a candour in his confession of the unprepared state of his country, which added largely to my confidence. Our dialogue was, I believe, unprecedented for the plainness of its enquiries and replies. It was perfectly Lacedæmonian.

"What regular force can Spain bring into the field?"

"None."

"What force has Napoleon in Spain at this moment?"

"At least two hundred and fifty thousand men, and those in the highest state of equipment and discipline."

"And yet you venture to resist?"

"We have resisted, we shall resist, and we shall beat them."

"In what state are your fortresses?"

"One half of them in the hands of the French, and the other half, without garrisons, provisions, or even guns; still, we shall beat them."

"Are not the French troops in possession of all the provinces?"

"Yes."

"Are they not in fact masters of the country?"

"No."

"How am I to reconcile those statements?"

"The French are masters by day; the Spaniards are masters by night."

"But you have none of the elements of national government. You have lost your king."

"So much the better."

"Your princes, nobles, and court."

"So much the better."

"Even your prime minister and whole administration are in the hands of the enemy."

"Best of all!" said the respondent, with a frown like a thunder-cloud.

"What resource, then, have you?"

"The people!" exclaimed the Spaniard, in a tone of superb defiance.

"Still—powerful as a united people are—before you can call upon a British government to embark in such a contest, it must be shown that the people are capable of acting together; that they are not separated by the jealousies which proverbially divide your country."

"Señor Inglese," said the Don, with a Cervantic curl of the lip, "I see, that Spain has not been neglected among the studies of your high station. But Spain is not to be studied in books. She is not to be sketched, like a fragment of a Moorish castle, and carried off in a portfolio. Europe knows nothing of her. You must pass the Pyrenees to conceive her existence. She lives on principles totally distinct from those of all other nations; and France will shortly find, that she never made a greater mistake than when she thought, that even the southern slope of the Pyrenees was like the northern."

"But," said I, "the disunion of your provinces, the extinction of your army, and the capture of your executive government, must leave the country naked to invasion. The contest may be gallant, but the hazard must be formidable. To sustain a war against the disciplined troops of France, and the daring determination of its ruler, would require a new age of miracle." The Spaniard bit his lip, and was silent. "At all events, your proposals do honour to the spirit of your country, and I shall not be the man to throw obstacles in your way. Draw up a memoir; state your means, your objects and your intentions, distinctly; and I shall lay it before the government without delay."

"Señor Inglese, it shall be done. In that memoir, I shall simply say that Spain has six ranges of mountains, all impregnable, and that the Spanish people are resolved to defend them; that the country is one vast natural fortress; that the Spanish soldier can sleep on the sand, can live on the simplest food, and the smallest quantity of that food; that he can march fifty miles a-day; that he is of the same blood as the conquerors of the Moors, and with the soldiers of Charles V.; and that he requires only discipline and leaders to equal the glory of his forefathers." His fine features glanced with manly exultation.

"Still, before I can bring your case before the country, we must be enabled to have an answer for the objections of the legislature. Your provinces are scarcely less hostile to each other than they are to the enemy. What plan can unite them in one system of defence? and, without that union, how can resistance be effectual?"

"Spain stands alone," was the reply. "Her manners, her feelings, and her people, have no examples in Europe. Her war will have as little similarity to the wars of its governments. It will be a war, not of armies, but of the shepherd, of the artificer, the muleteer, the contrabandist—a war of all classes the peasant, the priest, the noble, nay, the beggar on the highway. But this was the war of her ancestors, the war of the Asturias, which cleared the country of the Moors, and will clear it of the French. All Spain a mass of hostility, a living tide of unquenchable hatred and consuming fire—the French battalions, pouring over the Pyrenees, will be like battalions poured into the ocean. They will be engulfed; they will never return. Our provinces are divided, but they have one invincible bond—abhorrence of the French. Even their division is not infirmity, but strength. They know so little of each other that even the conquest of one half of Spain would be scarcely felt by the rest. This will be a supreme advantage in the species of war which we contemplate—a war of desultory but perpetual assaults, of hostilities that cease neither night nor day, of campaigns that know no distinction between summer and winter—a war in which no pitched battles will be fought, but in which every wall will be a rampart, every hollow of the hills a camp, every mountain a citadel, every roadside, and swamp, and rivulet, the place of an ambuscade. We shall have no battalions and brigades, we require no tactics; our sole science will be, to kill the enemy wherever he can be reached by bullet or knife, until we make Spain the tomb of invasion, and her very name an omen, and a ruin to the tyrant on the French throne."

The councils of England in the crisis were worthy of her ancient name. It was resolved to forget the long injuries of which Spain had been the instrument, during her passive submission to the arrogance of her ally and master. The Bourbons were now gone; the nation was disencumbered of that government of chamberlains, maids of honour, and duennas. It was to be no longer stifled in the perfumed atmosphere of court boudoirs, or to be chilled in the damps of the cloister. Its natural and noble proportions were to be left unfettered and undisguised by the formal fashions of past centuries of grave frivolity and decorous degradation. The giant was to rise refreshed. The Samson was to resume his primal purpose; he was no longer to sleep in the lap of his Delilah; the national fame was before him, and, breaking his manacles at one bold effort, he was thenceforth to stand, as nature had moulded him, powerful and prominent among mankind.

These were dreams, but they were high-toned and healthy dreams—the anticipations of a great country accustomed to the possession of freedom, and expecting to plant national regeneration wherever it set foot upon the soil. The cause of Spain was universally adopted by the people and was welcomed by Parliament with acclamation; the appointment of a minister to represent the cabinet in Spain was decided on, and this distinguished commission was pressed upon my personal sense of duty by the sovereign. My official rank placed me above ambassadorships, but a service of this order had a superior purpose. It was a mission of the country, not of the minister. I was to be the instrument of an imperial declaration of good-will, interest, and alliance to a whole people.

In another week, the frigate which conveyed me was flying before the breeze, along the iron-bound shore of Galicia; the brightest and most burning of skies was over my head, the most billowy of seas was dashing and foaming round me, and my eye was in continual admiration of the noble mountain barriers which, in a thousand shapes, guard the western coast of Spain from the ocean. At length the bay of Corunna opened before us; our anchor dropped, and I made my first step on the most picturesque shore, and among the most original people, of Europe. My destination was Madrid; but it was essential that I should ascertain all the facts in my power from the various provincial governments as I passed along; and I thus obtained a more ample knowledge of the people than could have fallen to the lot of the ordinary traveller. I consulted with their juntas, I was present at their festivals, I rode with their hidalgos, and I marched with their troops. One of the peculiarities which, as an Englishman, has always interested me in foreign travel is, that it brings us back to a period different from the existing age at home. All descending from a common stock, every nation of Europe has made a certain advance; but the advance has been of different degrees. Five hundred years ago, they were all nearly alike. In the Netherlands, I continually felt myself carried back to the days of the Protectorate; I saw nearly the same costume, the same formality of address, and the same habits of domestic life. In Germany, I went back a century further, and saw the English primitive style of existence, the same stiff architecture, the same mingling of stateliness and simplicity, not forgetting the same homage to the "divine right of kings." In Spain, I found myself in the thirteenth century, and but for the language, the heat, and the brown visages around me, could have imagined myself in England, in the days when "barons bold" still exercised the rights of feudalism, when gallant archers killed the king's deer without the king's permission, and when the priest was the lawgiver of the land.

Day by day, I saw the pilgrim making his weary way from shrine to shrine; the landowner caracoling his handsome horse over wild heaths and half-made highways—that horse caparisoned with as many fantastic trappings as the charger of chivalry, and both horse and rider forming no feeble representation of the knight bound on adventure. I saw the monastery of our old times, exhibiting all its ancient solidity, sternness, and pomp; with its hundred brethren; its crowd of sallow, silent domestics; its solemn service; and even with its beggars crowding and quarreling for their daily dole at its gate. The face of the country seemed to have been unchanged since the first invasion of the Visigoths:—immense commons, grown barren from the absence of all cultivation; vast, dreary sheep-walks; villages, few, rude, and thinly peopled; the absence of all enclosures, and a general look of loneliness, which, however, I could have scarcely imagined in England at any period since the Heptarchy. Yet, those wild wastes were often interspersed with delicious spots; where, after toiling half the day over a desert wild as Arabia, the traveller suddenly stood on the brink of some sweet and secluded valley, where the eye rested on almost tropical luxuriance—all the shrubs and blossoms which require so much shelter in our rougher climate, flourishing in the open air; hedges of myrtle and jessamine; huge olives, and primeval vines, spreading, in all the prodigality of nature, over the rocks; parasite plants clothing the oaks and elms with drapery of all colours, floating in every breath of wind; and, most delicious of all, in the fiery centre of Spain, streams, cool as ice and clear as crystal, gushing and glancing away through the depths of the valley; sometimes glittering in the sun, then plunging into shade, then winding along, seen by starts, like silver snakes, until they were lost under sheets of copse and foliage, unpruned by the hand of man, and which seemed penetrable only by the bird or the hare.

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WATERTON'S SECOND SERIES OF ESSAYS.[8]

At the conclusion of the autobiography prefixed to his former series of Essays, published some years since, Mr Waterton announced that he then "put away the pen not to be used again except in self-defence." That this resolution has been departed from, from whatever motive, will be matter for congratulation to most, if not all, of the readers of the "Wanderings" and "Essays;" and the volume before us derives an additional interest from its being an unsolicited donation to the widow of his deceased friend, Mr Loudon, the well-known naturalist. Methinks the author would not have done amiss in continuing, both to this and the former series of essays, the peculiarly appropriate title under which his first lucubrations were given to the world: since veritable Wanderings they are over every imaginable variety of subject and climate, from caymans in the Essequibo to the blood of St Januarius at Naples; schemes for the banishment of Hanoverian rats (Mr W. never allows this voracious intruder a British denizenship) in Yorkshire, and for averting the projected banishment of the rooks in Scotland. Among the amusing omniun gatherum intermingled with the valuable ornithological information in the present volume, we find dissertations on the gigantic raspberries, now, alas! no more produced in the ruined garden of Walton Hall—on the evils of tight shoes, tight lacing, and stiff cravats—on the natural history of that extinct-by-law variety of the human species called the chimney sweeper—and last, not least, on that of the author himself, in the continuation of his unique autobiography; and we rejoice to find him, though now close upon his grand climacteric, still able to climb a tree by the aid of toes which have never been cramped by tight shoes, with all the vigour, if not all the agility, of his lusty youth, breathing hostility against no living creature except Mr Swainson and Sir Robert Peel—the little love he already bore to the latter for framing the oath of abjuration for Catholics[9] not being greatly augmented by the imposition of the income-tax—and still maintaining in Walton Park an inviolable asylum for crows, hawks, owls, and all the generally proscribed tribes of the feathered race.

The continuation of the autobiography is taken up from the publication of the first volume of essays in 1837, and consists chiefly of the narrative of adventures by land and perils by sea, in an expedition with his family, by the route of Holland and the Rhine, to the sunny shores of Italy. But the intervening period was not without incidents worthy of record. By a judicious system of pavement joined with Roman cement, and drains secured at the mouths by iron grates, "Charles Waterton, in the year of grace 1839, effectually cleared the premises at Walton Hall of every Hanoverian rat, young and old ... and if I were to offer L.20 sterling money for the capture of a single individual, in or about any part of the premises, not one could be procured." Not long after this memorable achievement, a case of hydrophobia in Nottingham promised to afford him an opportunity of trying the virtues of the famous Wourali poison, as a cure for this dreadful and hitherto unconquerable malady. The difficulties and dangers encountered in the search for this potent narcotic through the wilds of Guiana, and the subsequent experiments on the ass Wouralia, which, after being apparently deprived of life by its influence, was revived by the inflation of the lungs with a blowpipe, and lived twenty-four years in clover at Walton, are familiar to the readers of the Wanderings—but its presumed efficacy in cases of hydrophobia was not destined to be tested in the present instance, as the patient had expired before Mr W.'s arrival. Its powers were, however, exhibited in the presence of a scientific assemblage:—one of two asses operated upon, though restored at the time, died on the third day, the other was perfectly recovered by the process of artificial respiration, and "every person present seemed convinced that the virulence of the Wourali poison was completely under the command of the operator ... and that it can be safely applied to a human being labouring under hydrophobia!" Now this inference, with all due deference to Mr Waterton, appears to partake not a little of the non sequitur; and unless the modus operandi by which relief is to be obtained during the suspension of vitality thus produced is more clearly explained, we doubt whether many applications will be made for "the scientific assistance of Mr Gibson of the General Hospital at Nottingham, to give the sufferer a chance of saving his life by the supposed, though yet untried, efficacy of the Wourali poison, which, worst come to the worst, would, by its sedative qualities, render death calm and composed, and free from pain." Satisfied, however, with the somewhat equivocal result of this experiment, Mr Waterton resumed his preparations for departure, and having "called up the gamekeeper, and made him promise, as he valued his place, that he would protect all hawks, crows, herons, jays, and magpies," sailed from Hull for Rotterdam with his two sisters-in-law and his only son, a boy eleven years of age.

Mr Waterton's Catholic sympathies for the Belgian revolt, "for real liberty in religious matters," and his lamentations over the magnificent churches in Holland, stripped of their pictures and ornaments on the change of religion, do not prevent his feeling very favourably disposed towards the Dutch and their country, "the uniformity of which, and the even tenor of their tempers, appear as if one had been made for the other." The protection extended to the stork, which builds without fear in the heart of their towns, gives them an additional claim on his good-will; and "would but our country gentlemen put a stop to the indiscriminate slaughter of birds by their ruthless gamekeepers, we should not have to visit Holland to see the true habits of the stork, nor roam through Germany to enjoy the soaring of the kite—a bird once very common in this part of Yorkshire, but now a total stranger to it." The progressive extinction of so many of the larger species of birds once indigenous to England before the progress of drainage and clearing; has long been a subject of regret not only to the naturalist but the sportsman. Of the stately bustard, once the ornament of all our downs, scarce a solitary straggler now remains—the crane, as well as the stork, which once abounded in the fen districts, has totally disappeared; and though the success which has attended the attempts to re-introduce the capercailzie in Scotland has restored to us one of our lost species, it is much to be feared that unless Mr Waterton's example, in converting his park into a sanctuary, be followed by other country gentlemen of ornithological tastes, the raven, the crow, and the larger species of hawks, in whose preservation no one is interested, and which are already becoming raræ aves, in the agricultural districts, will eventually disappear from the British Fauna.

The great influx of English into Belgium, while scarce any are to be found in Holland, is attributed, probably with reason, to the national love of sight-seeing, which finds gratification in the ceremonies and decorations of the Belgian churches—"up and down which crowds of English are for ever sauntering.... 'How have you got over your time to-day?' I said one afternoon to an acquaintance, who, like Mr Noddy's eldest son in Sterne, was travelling through Europe at a prodigious speed, and had very little spare time on his hands. He said he had knocked off thirteen churches that morning!" The headquarters of the English residents appear to be at Bruges, and Mr Waterton highly approves of the selection:—"Did my habits allow me to prefer streets to woods and green fields, I could retire to Bruges, and there end my days." But after visiting the convent of English nuns, where some of the ladies of Mr Waterton's family had received their education, and the portrait of "that regal profligate, Charles II." (Mr Waterton's love of truth here gets the better of his ancestral predilections for the house of Stuart) in the hall of the ancient society of archers, of which he was a member during his exile, the travellers continued their route by Ghent and along the valley of the Meuse, "which, on a fine warm day in July, appears as rich and beautiful as any valley can well be on this side of ancient Paradise," to Aix-la-Chapelle. At this famous Prussian watering-place Mr Waterton found much to move his bile, not only in the sight of ladies risking their fortunes at the public gaming-tables authorised and protected by government, but in the folly of the valetudinarians, who perversely counteract the beneficial effects of the waters by "resorting to the salle-à-manger, and there partaking of all the luxuries from the cornucopia of Epicurus, Bacchus, and Ceres." He derived some consolation, however, from the contemplation of the magnificent and varied prospect from the wooded heights of the Louisberg above the town; and the sight, on his last visit, of a pair of ravens circling over his head in aërial revolutions, and then winging their way towards the forest of Ardennes, awakened recollections of home, and "of the rascally cobbler who desecrated the Sunday morning by robbing the last raven's nest in this vicinity." At Freyburg they encountered a phenomenon, in the shape of a poetical German waiter—and a poet, too, in the English language, though he had never been in England, nor much among English; but the waiter's effusions, the subject of which was the cathedral of Freyburg, were never destined to reach England, but now lie, with the rest of Mr Waterton's travelling goods and chattels, in the wreck of the Pollux, at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea.

The passage of the Alps disappointed our traveller's hopes of finding among their heights some of the rarer European birds:—"the earth appeared one huge barren waste, and the heavens produced not a single inhabitant of air." On descending the southern side of the mountains, they at length received ocular demonstration of their being really in Italy, by observing matronly-looking woman engaged in certain offices touching the long black hair of her daughter, which showed that combs were still as scarce as when Horace stigmatized the "incomptum caput" of Canidia; and the necessity of lavender water, to pass with any thing like comfort through the town and villages which looked so enchanting at a distance in the midst of their olive groves and cypresses, is feelingly commented upon. But before entering Rome, we must give Mr Waterton's own account of an exploit which made some noise at the time of its performance, and the motives at least of which appear to have been mis-stated. On a former visit, he had gained great renown by climbing, in company with Captain Alexander of the royal navy, to the summit of the cross surmounting the ball of St Peter's, and leaving his gloves on the point of the conductor! and as a pendant to this notable achievement, it was announced about this time, in most of the English papers, that in a fervour of religious enthusiasm, on approaching the Eternal City, he had walked barefoot as a pilgrim the last twenty miles, and thus so severely lacerated his feet as to be incapable for some time of moving. "Would that my motives had been as pure as represented! The sanctity of the churches, the remains of holy martyrs which enrich them, the relics of canonized saints placed in such profusion throughout them, might well induce a Catholic traveller to adopt this easy and simple mode of showing his religious feeling. But, unfortunately, the idea never entered my mind at the time; I had no other motives than those of easy walking and self-enjoyment." The enjoyment to be derived from walking without shoes or stockings over a rough pavement, in sharp frost, proved as problematical in practice as it would be to most persons in theory; and Mr Waterton found to his cost, that the fifteen years which had elapsed since he went barefoot with impunity in the forests of Guiana, had materially impaired his soles' power of endurance. After sustaining a severe injury in his right foot, of which the intensity of the cold prevented his being sensible at the instant, he was glad to resume his chaussure, and was laid up on the sofa for two months after his arrival. "It was this unfortunate adventure which gave rise to the story of my walking barefooted into Rome, and which gained me a reputation by no means merited on my part."

Notwithstanding this mishap, and the many things offensive to English feelings in the manifold impurities of Roman streets and kitchens, Mr Waterton speaks with much satisfaction of his sojourn for several months in "Rome, immortal Rome, replete with every thing that can instruct and please." Though his former visits had in great degree satiated him with galleries and palaces, he still found great attractions in the studio of the Roman Landseer, Vallati,[10] the famous painter of wild-boars; but his great point of attraction seems to have been the bird-market near the Pantheon—the extent of traffic in which may be judged from the statement, that during the spring and autumn passage of the quails, which are taken in nets of prodigious extent on the shores of the Mediterranean, 17,000 of these birds have passed the Roman custom-house in one day. The catalogue of birds exposed for sale as articles of food comprehends nearly all the species found in Italy: not even robin-redbreast is sacred from the omnivorous maw of the Italian gourmand, and a hundred at a time may be seen lying on a stall. "The birdmen outwardly had the appearance of banditti, but it as all outside, and nothing more: they were good men notwithstanding their uncouth looks, and good Christians too, for I could see them waiting at the door of the Jesuits' church by half-past four on a winter's morning, to be ready for the first mass." By ingratiating himself with this rough-seeming fraternity, Mr Waterton succeeded in obtaining specimens of many rare birds, which fortunately escaped the wreck of the Pollux, by having been previously forwarded to Leghorn. Among these scattered ornithological notices, we find some interesting remarks on the true designation of the "sparrow sitting alone upon the house-top," to which the Royal Psalmist likened himself in his penitence and vigils. It is obvious that the description could not apply to our common house sparrow, the habits of which are certainly the reverse of solitary or pensive; and Mr Waterton is undoubtedly correct in referring it to the Blue or Solitary Thrush—a bird not found in this country, but common in Spain, Italy, and the south of France, and still more so in the Levant—the Petrocincla cyanea of scientific naturalists, and the Passera solitaria of the Italians. "It is a real thrush in size, in shape, in habits, and in song—and is indeed a solitary bird, for it never associates with any other, and only with its own mate in breeding time—and even then it is often seen quite alone upon the house-top, where it warbles in sweet and plaintive strains, and continues its song as it moves in easy flight from roof to roof. The traveller may often see it on the remains of the Temple of Peace, but much more frequently on the stupendous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, and always on the Colosseum: and, in fine, on the tops of most of the churches, monasteries, and convents, within and without the walls of the Eternal City. It being an assiduous frequenter of the habitations of man, I cannot have a doubt that it was the same bird which King David saw on the house-top before him, and to which he listened as it poured forth its sweet and plaintive song."

The ceremonies of St Anthony's Day, when the beasts of burden, decked in many-coloured trappings, are brought to receive the priestly benediction, are described with much unction, and defended with Mr Waterton's usual zeal for the ordinances of his church, and with considerable tact, against the ridicule often thrown upon them by "thoughtless and censorious travellers." "I recalled to my mind the incessant and horrible curses which our village urchins vent against their horses on the Barnsley canal, which passes close by my porters' lodges"—and truly the most rigid of Protestants could scarcely deny, in this case, the advantage, for the well-doing of both man and beast, which the usages of Rome have over those of Yorkshire. But the approach of the malaria season at length compelled them to leave Rome for Naples; and on the journey Mr Waterton's ornithological tastes were gratified to the utmost. "I saw more birds than I had seen on the whole of the journey from England; and after having seen the ram of Apulia, I no longer considered Homer's story of Ulysses with the sheep of Polyphemus as so very much out of the way." But a still more imposing spectacle than the festival of St Anthony awaited them at Naples: this was the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius, on September 19, to witness which was the principal object of their visit. We shall leave Mr Waterton to speak for himself. "At the termination of high mass, the phial containing the blood was carried by one of the canons into the body of the cathedral, that every person might have an opportunity of inspecting the blood, and kissing the phial, should he feel inclined. There were two phials—a large one, containing the blood as it had flowed from the wounds of the martyr at its execution; and a smaller one, containing his blood mixed with sand, just as it had been taken from the ground on which it had fallen. These two phials were enclosed in a very strong and beautifully ornamented case of silver and glass. I kissed this case, and had a most satisfactory opportunity of seeing the blood in its solid state,... and the canon who held it turned it over and over many times to prove to us that the blood was not liquid.... At one o'clock P.M., no symptoms whatever of a change had occurred. A vast number of people had already left the cathedral, so that I found the temperature considerably lowered. Precisely at a quarter before two, the blood suddenly and entirely liquefied. The canon who held the case passed close by me, and afforded me a most favourable opportunity of accompanying him close up to the high altar, where I kissed the phial, and joined my humble prayers to those of the multitude.... Nothing in the whole course of my life has struck me so forcibly as this occurrence;... and I here state, in the most unqualified manner, my firm conviction, that the liquefaction of the blood of St Januarius is miraculous, beyond the shadow of a doubt. Were I to conceal this my conviction from the public eye, I should question the soundness of both my head and my heart, and charge my pen with arrant cowardice."

After a short excursion to Sicily, in which Mr Waterton had occasion to surmise that the ancient furies of Scylla and Charybdis had quitted their old quarters to take up their abode in the passport-offices, and regretted his inability to avail himself of the opportunities which the island afforded, for observing the spring and autumn passage of the migratory birds, they paid a farewell visit to the tomb of Virgil, and left "that laughing, noisy, merry city of Naples on a fine and sunny morning, to enjoy for eight or nine months more the soothing quiet of the Roman capital." At length, on the 16th June 1841, the party left Rome, and sailed the next day from Civita Vecchia, on board the Pollux steamer, for Leghorn; but their good fortune at length deserted them. "Cervantes has told us that there is nothing certain in this life—'no hay cosa segura en esta vida.'" It was soon evident to Mr Waterton, as an old traveller, that there was a great want of nautical discipline on board the Pollux, and of this they soon had fatal proof. In the midst of the night the vessel came in collision with the Mongibello, a steamer of larger size, steering on the opposite course, which stove her in amidships, and she sunk in a quarter of an hour. The captains and mates of both vessels were asleep below, but from the calmness of the sea, and the exertions of the Prince of Canino (Charles Bonaparte,) who was fortunately a passenger on board the Mongibello, and took the helm from the steersman when he was on the point of sheering off from the wreck, all the crew and passengers of the Pollux, except one man, were got safe on board the former vessel. All their property was lost, and, on their being landed the next day at Leghorn, an attempt was made by the authorities to detain the vessel, and all on board, for twenty days in quarantine, on the ground of the Pollux's bill of health having been lost in the foundered vessel! But Prince Canino again came to the rescue, and they eventually returned in the Mongibello to Civita Vecchia, and thence to Rome, where, as a climax to their misfortunes, Mr Waterton was for some time laid up by an attack of fever. It was not till the 20th of July that he finally set out with his party for England, having in the mean time made a singular addition to his suite, which is treated of at length in one of the Essays.

Among the various strange birds which find a place in the Roman bill of fare, is a pretty little owl yclept the Civetta, (called by British ornithologists, from its diminutive size, the passerina, or sparrow owl,) which abounds throughout Italy, where it figures in more varied capacities than is consistent with the usually reserved habits of its race. "You may see it plucked and ready trussed for the spit, on the same stall at which hawks, crows, jackdaws, jays, magpies, hedgehogs, frogs, snails, and buzzards, are offered for sale to the passing conoscenti"—a catalogue of dainties which bears but a small proportion to a more extended carte raisonnée elsewhere given by Mr Waterton, who verily believes that "scarcely any thing which has had life in it comes amiss to the Italians in the way of food, except the Hanoverian rat." It is used by sportsmen (as we find from Savi's Ornitologia Toscana) as a decoy for small birds, which it attracts within gunshot by its singular gestures when placed on the top of a pole; and it "is much prized by the gardener, for its uncommon ability in destroying insects, snails, slugs, and reptiles. There is scarcely an outhouse in the vineyards and gardens which is not tenanted by the Civetta, and it is often brought up tame from the nest." It has hitherto been known in England only as a rare and accidental visitor; and Mr Waterton, actuated by a patriotic desire to secure for his countrymen the benefit of its services—"not, by the way, in the kitchen, but in the kitchen-garden"—provided himself with a dozen as compagnons de voyage, on quitting Rome. At Genoa, an inclination was manifested by the custom-house officers to claim duty on this novel article of export—and a precedent might have been drawn from the case of the eagles which were sent from Killarney to Colonel Montagu, before the duties between England and Ireland were abolished, and detained at Bristol on the plea that there was a duty on all singing-birds! The Genoese doganieri, however, on Mr Waterton's assurance that the owls were not for the purposes of traffic, and were, moreover, the native produce of la bellissima Italia, (with the sly addition, that he "had reason to believe they are common in Genoa, so that they can well be spared,") graciously allowed them to pass duty-free; but at Basle an unexpected obstacle arose. Mr Waterton's letter of credit had been lost in the Pollux; and in spite of letters of recommendation from the Prince of Canino, and the Italian Rothschild, Torlonia, "M. Passavant the banker, a wormwood-looking money-monger, refused to advance a single sous," even on the deposit of a valuable watch; and Mr Waterton, with his owls and his family, would have stuck fast at Basle, but for the arrival of Mr W. Brougham, (brother of Lord Brougham,) who furnished him with a supply; and the whole party reached Aix-la-Chapelle safe and sound. But here Mr Waterton thought proper, by way of cleansing his protegés from the soils of their long journey, to give them, as well as himself, the benefit of a warm bath!—"an act of rashness" (as he himself terms it) which caused the death of five of the number from cold the same night. Two others perished afterwards from casualties, and the remaining five arrived safe at Walton Hall. "On the 10th of May 1842, there being abundance of slugs, snails, and beetles on the ground, at seven o'clock in the evening, the weather being serene and warm, I opened the door of the cage, and the five owls stepped out to try their fortunes in this wicked world. As they retired into the adjacent thicket, I bade then be of good heart; and although the whole world was now open to them, I said if they would stop in my park I would be glad of their company, and would always be a friend and benefactor to them." How the little strangers have sped—whether they have increased and multiplied in the hospitable shades of Walton Hall, to gratify their entomological tastes for the benefit of neighbouring kitchen-gardens, or strayed from this asylum, and fallen victims as raræ aves to some ruthless bird-stuffer, we hope to be informed in the "more last words" which we yet hope for on the pen of Mr Waterton.

"Of all the brave birds that e'er I did see,
The owl is the fairest in her degree,"

quoth an old ditty; and we must ourselves confess to a peculiar penchant for an "owl in an ivy bush," partly from personal sympathy for its shortsightedness, and not less for the aspect of solemn wisdom which gained for it of yore a place on the crest of Minerva's helmet, and has made it, in the regions of the East, the counsellor of kings and princes. Who has not heard of the reproof thus conveyed, through the medium of a vizier skilled in the mystic language of birds, to the devastating ambition of Sultan Mahmood of Ghazni? The gates of whose tomb, (it may be remarked par parenthèse,) the savans have now decided never to have been at Somnat at all—a piece of useful knowledge cheaply acquired, no doubt, at the expense of a war which has secured the owls of that country, for some years to come, against any scarcity of ruined villages wherewith to endow their daughters. We regret, therefore, to find that Mr Waterton, to whom we owe the introduction of the Civetta in England, and who, in the first series of his Essays, has eloquently vindicated the character of the barn-owl against the aspersions alike of the poets of the Augustan age and the old women of the present day, still denies the accomplishment of hooting to the Yorkshire barn-owls, and persists in considering it restricted to the single individual shot by Sir William Jardine. "We know full well that most extraordinary examples of splendid talent do from time to time make their appearance on the world's wide stage—and may we not suppose that the barn-owl which Sir William shot in the absolute act of hooting, may have been a gifted bird of superior parts and knowledge, endowed, perhaps, from its early days with the faculty of hooting, or else taught it by its neighbour the tawny owl? I beg to remark, that though I unhesitatingly grant the faculty of hooting to this one particular individual owl, still I flatly refuse to believe that hooting is common to barn-owls in general." The same denial is repeated in the present volume; but Sir William's owl is no longer alone in his glory, as the possession of a similar talent, to at least a limited extent, has been ascribed in the pages of the Zoologist to the Oxford owls. As Mr Waterton's accuracy as an observer cannot be questioned, we can only infer that the advantages of education enjoyed by the owls of Alma Mater and the Modern Athens, enables them to attain a degree of vocal proficiency beyond the reach of their rustic brethren in Yorkshire—and we hope ere long to hear of Mr Waterton's having added a feathered professor of languages, from one or other of these seats of learning, to the colony of barn-owls established in the ruin of the old gateway at Walton.

Mr Waterton has never been famous for showing too much mercy to his opponents in controversy—and, on the present occasion, the vials of his wrath are poured forth without stint, though certainly not without strong provocation, on the head of Mr Swainson, well known some years since as a writer on natural history, and as one of the principal advocates of the Quinary System[11]—a sort of zoological transcendentalism (to borrow a phrase from Kant and his disciples) then fashionable, according to which all the genera and species of animals, known or hereafter to be discovered, were held bound spontaneously to arrange themselves in circular groups of five, neither more nor less, in obedience to some intuitive principle of nature, of which the details were not yet very clearly made out. It would appear that Mr Swainson, who is characterised as a "morbid and presumptuous man," had been at variance—on personal as well as scientific grounds—with Mr Waterton, from whom he received a castigation for his ornithological heresies, in a letter published in 1837; but his retaliation was delayed for two years, when, in an account of the cayman, published in Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia, he describes it as "on land a slow-paced, and even timid animal; so that an active boy, armed with a small hatchet, might easily dispatch one. There is no great prowess, therefore, required to ride on the back of a poor cayman after it has been secured, or perhaps wounded; and a modern writer might well have spared the recital of his feats in this way upon the cayman of Guiana, had he not been influenced in this, and numberless other instances, by the greatest possible love of the marvellous, and a constant propensity to dress truth in the garb of fiction;" and subsequently speaks of the cayman as "so timid that, had we been disposed to perform such ridiculous feats, our compassion for the poor animals would have prevented us." Mr Waterton had no opportunity of replying to these offensive imputations at the time they were published, being then absent in Italy, while Mr Swainson was on the point of finally quitting England in order to become a settler in New Zealand. But though thus separated by the entire diameter of the globe, "steam will soon convey to him a copy of this," says Mr Waterton—and verily he has demolished the unlucky Swainson without ruth or mercy. Whether this "wholesale dealer in unsound zoology," as Mr Waterton calls him, ever can have seen a cayman, except at a safe distance, appears somewhat dubious; and his story of this reptile hiding its prey in a hole till semi-putrid, though it would convey a high idea of the respect entertained by his brother caymans for the rights of property, must be incredible to any one who has ever inspected the jaws of the animals which (as Mr Waterton observes) "are completely formed for snatch and swallow." We fear, moreover, that the character which general experience has assigned to these huge reptiles, whether called crocodiles, caymans, or alligators, is much more in accordance with the anecdote related by Governor Ynciarte of a man carried off into the river by one of these monsters from the alameda, or public walk, of Angostura, than with Swainson's description of a timid creature, liable to be knocked on the head by an idle boy with a hatchet, the defenceless state of which excited his compassion. If, therefore, Mr Swainson does not come forward, either to substantiate these novel statements, or to retract them, the scientific world is likely to come to the conclusion drawn by Mr Waterton, that, "when he wrote his account of this reptile, he was either totally unacquainted with its habits and economy, or that he wilfully perverted them, in order to be revenged on me" for the letter above mentioned.

From the circumstances under which the present volume was put forth, one or two letters are included which do not appear to have been originally intended for publication—and these are not the least characteristic parts of the work—as that to Mr Hog of Newliston in advocacy of the persecuted Scotch rooks, and one to Mr Loudon himself on the methods of clearing a garden from vermin, in which there is much practical sense. It is not good for weasels or hedgehogs, any more than for man, to be alone in this world. "You say 'you will send to a gardener in the country for a weasel.' You must send for two, male and female. A bachelor weasel, or a spinster weasel, would not tarry four-and-twenty hours in your garden. Either of them would go a sweet-hearting, and not return. You remark that your 'hedgehogs soon disappeared.' No doubt, unless confined by a wall.... A garden, well fenced by a wall high enough to keep dogs out, is a capital place for hedgehogs. But there ought always to be two, man and wife.... The windhover (or kestrel) hawk is excellent for killing beetles, and also for consuming slugs and snails; cats dare not attack him, wherefore he is very fit for a garden." We have not heard whether any effect has been produced by Mr Waterton's remonstrances against the edict of extermination fulminated against his sable friends the rooks—but we fear that farmers in all countries are much on a par with those Delaware colonists and Isle of Bourbon planters, whose fate he adduces as a warning. Having destroyed their grakles, on a similar charge to that on which sentence has now been passed on the rooks, they lost their whole crops by insects, and were compelled not only to re-introduce the grakles, but to protect them by law. We trust that the Scotch farmers will not be obliged, by a similar calamity, to avail themselves of Mr Waterton's obliging offer to send them, in case of such necessity, a fresh supply of these "useful and interesting birds."

Mr Waterton never loses an opportunity of showing his contempt for the modern systems of ornithology, which, by their complicated nomenclature, eternally changed by every new sciolist, have almost succeeded in converting that fascinating science into an unintelligible jargon of hard names. "As I am not a convert to the necessity or advantages of giving to many of our British birds these new and jaw-breaking names, I will content myself with the old nomenclature, so well-known to every village lad throughout the country.... The ancients called the wren troglodytas; but it is now honoured with the high-sounding name of Anorthura, alleging for a reason, that the ancients were quite mistaken in their supposition that this bird was an inhabitant of caves, as it is never to be seen within them. Methinks that the ancients were quite right, and that our modern masters in ornithology are quite wrong. If we only for a moment reflect that the nest of the wren is spherical, and is of itself, as it were, a little cave, we can easily imagine that the ancients, on seeing the bird going in and out of this artificial cave, considered the word troglodytas an appropriate appellation."

Among the various feathered visitants attracted by the city of refuge provided for them at Walton, were a flock of twenty-four wild-geese, of the large and beautiful species called the Canada or Cravat goose, (from the conspicuous white patch on its black neck,) which unexpectedly appeared on the lake one winter, and took up their permanent abode there, occasionally making excursions to the other waters in the neighbourhood. "In the breeding season, two or three pairs will remain here. The rest take themselves off, and are seen no more till the return of autumn, when they reappear without any addition to the flock or diminution of it. This is much to be wondered at; and I would fain hazard a conjecture that the young may possibly be captured in the place where they have been hatched, and the pinioned to prevent escape. But, after all, this is mere speculation. We know nothing of the habits of our birds of passage when they are absent from us; and we cannot account how it comes to pass that the birds just mentioned invariably return to this country without any perceptible increase of numbers; or, if the original birds die or are destroyed, why it is that the successors arrive here in the same numbers as their predecessors." This remark has before been made in the case of swallows and other migratory birds, the numbers of which returning each spring, in localities where they can be accurately observed and counted, has always been found to be he same as that which arrived the preceding year, though the flock which departed southward in autumn had been swollen by the young broods accompanying their parents. Thus Gilbert White ascertained that at Selborne the number of swifts was invariably eleven pair; and, as in some instances when old birds have been caught and marked, they have been found to return during several succeeding years, this fact would seem to justify the inference that the young birds, after quitting the country of their birth, do not, for at least a year or two, join in the annual migration of their species.

By waylaying the stay-at-home geese at the time when the moult of the wing-quills disabled them for flight, Mr Waterton succeeded in securing and pinioning six of them, thus preventing their future departure. They subsequently received an accession to their party in two Bernacle ganders, which Mr Waterton had brought over from Rotterdam, and the partners of which had died soon after their arrival, perhaps from the act of pinioning them; though Mr Waterton seems more inclined to attribute their untimely end to the stupidity of a Hull custom-house officer, who sent the hamper containing them jolting in a truck without springs over the rough pavement to the custom-house, only to be peremptorily sent back, as not liable to duty, by another of the same genus. "The two ganders, bereft of their connubial comforters, seemed to take their misfortunes sorely to heart for some time, till at last they began to make advances for permission to enter into the company of the Canadian geese. These good birds did not hesitate to receive them; and from that time these two very distinct species of geese (one being only half the size of the other) have become inseparable companions." The confederacy of these distant relations led, however, to some unexpected results, which are related by Mr Waterton with inimitable quaintness. On returning from Italy in the autumn of 1841, he was informed by the keeper that a left-handed marriage had been struck up between one of the little ganders and a pinioned Canadian goose, the produce of which had been five addle eggs. "Had he told me that the income-tax is a blessing, and the national debt an honour to the country, I could more readily have believed him, than that a Canada goose had been fool enough to unite herself to a Bernacle gander. Nevertheless, the man persisted in what he affirmed; and I told the story to others, and nobody believed me." The breeding-season of 1842 proved, however, the truth of the story; but the oddly-matched couple were again disappointed in their hopes of a family—the eggs all proving addle. The third year saw the persevering pair again engaged in incubation: "and nothing could exceed the assiduity with which the little Bernacle stood guard, often on one leg, over his bulky partner. If any body approached the place, his cackling was incessant; he would run at him with the fury of a turkey-cock; he would jump up at his knees, and not desist in his aggressions till the intruder had retired. There was something so remarkably disproportionate betwixt this goose and gander, that I gave to this the name of Mopsus, and to that the name of Nisa:[12] ... the whole affair appeared to me one of ridicule and bad taste; and I was quite prepared for a termination similar to that of the two preceding years, when behold! to my utter astonishment, out came two young ones, the remainder of the five eggs being addle. The vociferous gesticulations and strutting of little Mopsus were beyond endurance when he first caught sight of his long-looked-for progeny. He screamed aloud, whilst Nisa helped him to attack me with their united wings and hissings, as I approached the nest in order to convey the little ones to the water ... and this loving couple, apparently so ill-assorted and disproportionate, have brought up the progeny with great care and success. The hybrids are elegantly shaped, but are not so large as the mother nor so small as the father; their plumage partaking in colour with that of both parents.... I certainly acted rashly, notwithstanding appearances, in holding this faithful couple up to the ridicule of visitors who accompanied me to the spot. I have had a salutary lesson, and shall be more guarded for the future in giving an opinion. My speculation that a progeny could not be produced from the union of a Bernacle gander with a Canada goose has utterly failed. I stand convinced by a hybrid, reprimanded by a gander, and instructed by a goose."

The melody ascribed to the dying swan has long been well known to exist only in the graceful mythology of the ancients; but as few opportunities occur of witnessing the bird's last moments, some interest attaches to Mr Waterton's personal observations on this point, which we can ourselves corroborate, having not long since been present at the death of a pet swan, which, like Mr Waterton's favourite, had been fed principally by hand; and, instead of seeking to conceal itself at the approach of death, quitted the water, and lay down to die on the lawn before its owner's door. "He then left the water for good and all, and sat down on the margin of the pond. He soon became too weak to support his long neck in an upright position. He nodded, and then tried to recover himself; and then nodded again, and again held up his head: till at last, quite enfeebled and worn out, his head fell gently on the grass, his wings became expanded a trifle or so, and he died while I was looking on.... Although I gave no credence to the extravagant notion which antiquity had entertained of melody from the mouth of the dying swan, still I felt anxious to hear some plaintive sound or other, some soft inflection of the voice, which might tend to justify that notion in a small degree. But I was disappointed.... He never even uttered his wonted cry, nor so much as a sound, to indicate what he felt within."

Mr Waterton repeats in the present volume the determination which he had expressed in his former Essays, not to appear again before the public as an author:—"It is time to say farewell, and to bid adieu to natural history, as far as the press is concerned." But we still hope that he may again be induced, on returning from Italy, whither we believe he has once more bent his steps, by some other cause than the death of a valued friend, to depart from this resolution. As he himself remarks with truth, in the preface to his first series of Essays, "we can never expect to have a complete history of birds, until he who undertakes the task of writing it shall have studied his subject in the field of nature,"—and how little this has been attended to even in the ornithology of our own country, is sufficiently shown by the errors which, till of late, disfigured all the received works on this subject, and have been copied with implicit faith from one soi-disant naturalist by another. Since that kindred spirit Gilbert White, the first English naturalist who studied the habits of living birds in the open air, instead of describing the colours of the plumage of stuffed specimens in cabinets, we have had no one who has investigated the economy of animals, and particularly of that most beautiful class of the animal kingdom, the birds, so thoroughly con amore as Mr Waterton, in this and his preceding publications—identifying himself (it may almost be said) with their feelings and idiosyncrasies, and vindicating them from the aspersions thrown upon them in the writings of closet-naturalists, with the indignant zeal of a champion whose heart and soul is in the cause of injured innocence. Those who saw the sloth exhibited last summer in the Regent's Park Zoological Gardens, when at large and suspended by its huge claws to the under side of a branch of a tree, must have recognised the minute accuracy of Mr Waterton's account, in the Wanderings, of the habits of this animal, so much impugned at the time, because diametrically opposed to the statements of zoologists who had either never seen it alive, or seen it only when placed on a flat surface, a position which it never assumes in its natural state, and which its conformation renders one of extreme pain and constraint. Much animadversion has also been lavished by writers of the same class on Mr Waterton's sketches of British ornithology, as the facilities for observation procured by the security afforded to his protegés, and the unusual degree to which they have been consequently familiarised, have enabled him to overthrow many long-established errors—a thankless task at best, and which in some instances has not been rendered more palatable to those whose blunders were thus exposed, by the unsparing shafts of his raillery. But against all these antagonists Mr Waterton is very well able to defend himself, as the unlucky Mr Swainson and some others of his assailants know to their cost; and wishing him the full fruition for many long years of the bodily activity which enables him still to scale the highest tree in Walton Park to inspect a crow's nest, and not less of that irresistible naïveté and bonhommie which give such enjoyable zest to all his writings, we bid him for the present farewell—and if, in sooth, we are ne'er again to meet the Lord of Walton Hall in print, we scarce "shall look upon his like again!"

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WARREN'S LAW STUDIES.[13]

The readers of Blackwood who, month after month, followed with increasing interest the adventures of Titmouse, and the adversity and restoration of the Aubrey family, will excuse us if we apparently diverge from our usual literary course to track the author of "Ten Thousand a-Year" in a work which he has given to the legal profession, or rather to those who meditate entering upon that profession, or who have just set their foot upon the threshold.

Mr Warren's "Introduction to Law Studies" has already received the approbation of the public, testified by the sale of an unusually large edition. This has prompted the author to fresh endeavours to render it worthy of the peculiar place it fills, and of his own name; and he now, "after ten years of additional experience, (eight of them at the bar,)" publishes a second edition, "remodelled, rewritten, and greatly enlarged"—indeed so considerably altered and amplified as to be, in reality, a new work under the old title.

"In the present work," says the preface, "is incorporated one which the author has for some years meditated offering to the public, viz. an elementary and popular outline of the leading doctrines and practice of each of the three great departments of the law, civil, criminal, and ecclesiastical." The work, therefore, now consists of three distinct parts. 1. A general survey of the legal profession—a description of the nature of its several departments, of the various studies, labours, modes of life, of the conveyancer, the special pleader, the common-law and equity barrister, in order to guide the choice of a young man, who probably has hitherto a very confused notion of what, and how many different things, may be implied in the vague expression of "going to the bar." 2. A concise and elementary view of the several branches of the law which fall to the especial study of these several departments of the profession, as equity, the ecclesiastical and common law; and, 3. the recommendation of a course of study, pointing out the best books on each subject, and adding many useful hints to the young student on the discipline of his mind, and the acquirement of general knowledge.

To us it seems that such a work must be of very great utility, and that Mr Warren has given the most complete "beginning book" that was ever put into the hands of a young person seeking, or entering, a profession. It is not a publication which, as far as we know, replaces or competes with any other, but fills up a vacancy, and supplies a want which must have often been painfully felt. How can a young man, ambitious of entering the bar, know the nature of that profession into which he is so anxious to enlist himself? He goes into a court of justice, and sees men in their grotesque but imposing costume haranguing the judge and the jury, and without further thought he resolves that he too will be an orator and haranguer. Or what is more frequently the case, he reads the published speeches of an Erskine or a Curran, accompanied with memoirs of the men, and accounts of their forensic triumphs, and he burns to achieve the like actions, and to wield the same "resistless eloquence." But who is to tell him the nature of that territory, and by what manner of journey it is to be traversed, which lies between him and the gowned orator he is desirous of emulating? He sees the great actor on the stage, or hears of the intoxicating applause which he wins; but who is to conduct him behind the scenes, show him the apprenticeship he has to pass through, the hazards of failure, the impatience and tedium of unemployed energies—"the sad seclusion of unfrequented chambers, or the sadder seclusion of crowded courts?"[14] How invaluable, at such a time, would be some kind good-natured friend, who had passed through the rough experience, who had sufficient remembrance of his own early mistakes and difficulties to comprehend all his bewilderment, and sufficient tolerance to endure being questioned on matters which to him have grown too trite and familiar to seem to need explanation. In Mr Warren's book he will meet with exactly the information he wants; he will find a chart of the profession unrolled before him; he may quietly test his own abilities, or his own courage, to adopt any of the several departments as they are submitted to his inspection. He will obtain all that he could gather from that kind good-natured friend at the bar, whom he has been longing for, and would so willingly seize by the button—nay, far more than he could gather from any one man who had not made the subject one of especial attention, and taken pains himself to collect information from various quarters. Besides, how infinitely agreeable is it, whilst yet a resolution is unripe, whilst yet it is the secret of our bosom, to be able to get our doubts solved, and our questions answered, from the silent pages of a book; to be spared the penance of exposing half-formed designs to the jocular scrutiny of our friends—to be permitted to consult without necessarily making a confidant—to be able to dismiss our thought, if it is destined to be dismissed, without betraying how dear a guest it has been.

The more youthful and less instructed of its readers will find every portion of this work useful to them; especially they will have reason to thank; the author for that facile introduction he has offered them to the study of the law itself. Never has been such a gently inclined plane set up, for weak and unsteady feet, against the hill of legal knowledge. The talent which Mr Warren has for familiar and elementary exposition is something quite peculiar. Nor will they fail to profit by his many practical hints for the discipline of the mind, and his advice as to their general reading. The student more advanced in years and in thought, and who entertains the project of entering the profession at a time when his mind has approached towards maturity, will perceive, and will have the candour to reflect, that much of the work was not written for him. But, on the other hand, he is the very person who will especially value it for that description of practical, familiar, but most necessary information, which it is rare to get from books at all—which to him it is peculiarly disagreeable to be compelled to extract piece-meal from chance conversation with men but half furnished with it, and perhaps impatient of the interrogatories put to them. What are the distinctions between the several species of the lawyer? What sort of an animal is, in reality, the conveyancer, or the special pleader, or the equity draftsman—what are its habits, where its haunts—how is it bred, how nourished—what process is he himself to go through, before he can be recognised as belonging to the class—how best may he set to work, and with least loss of time?—these are matters which he is very curious to know, and to him nothing is more welcome than to find them all explained in the printed page—to find them where he is accustomed to look for every thing, amongst his old friends the books.

Surprise has often been expressed at the fact, that there is no publicly appointed method of legal tuition, no lectures delivered on which it is compulsory to attend, not even any examination to be finally undergone before admittance to the bar. A little acquaintance, however, with the nature of legal studies, will soon dissipate this astonishment. There is but one way in which the law can be mastered; severe, steady, solitary reading, accompanied by the privilege of watching the real practice of the jurist in the chambers of the conveyancer or the special pleader. To one bent on the professional study of the law; lectures would be mere waste of time. To the idler they may bear the appearance, and bring some of the profit, of study; to the conscientious and resolved student, they would be an idleness and a dissipation. Where a subject admits of being oratorically treated, good lectures are extremely valuable; for oratory has its office in tuition, stimulates to reflection, and stirs generous sentiments, and we wish the oratory of the professor's chair were more cultivated amongst us than it is. Nor need we say that where the subject admits or requires the illustration of scientific experiments, lectures are almost indispensable. But in the tangled study of the law, where one must go backwards and forwards, as in a rope-walk, and twist one's own cable out of many threads—of what use can the lecturer possibly be? To teach us law in a fluent discourse, what is it but to have us feed—as the humming-birds are said to do—upon the wing? But even humming-birds feed in no such fashion; they sit down to their supper of rose-water. Much more must a lawyer have his table—his desk—fast before him; and spreading out his various fare, which needs a deal of mastication, feed alternately, and slowly and solemnly, on the several dishes which with ostrich stomach he has to digest.

As to the absence of all examination previous to an admission to the bar, the fact, that not only in our own inns of court, but in all similar institutions, such examinations have been allowed to dwindle into some empty and puerile form, sufficiently demonstrates their inutility. If an examination were appointed, it would be no test of the efficiency of the advocate; no sufficient guarantee to the ingenuous client who should wander into Westminster Hall in search of a lawyer. Not to add that the learned gentleman may have had ample time to forget all his legal knowledge in the interval between his call to the bar and the opening of his first brief. A license, indeed, is given to practise as an advocate, without any other qualification than that of respectability of character, and the payment of certain fees; but the case of no client is confided to the young orator, unless those who have the greatest interest in his competency are satisfied that he can be safely relied on. Men suffer their health to be trifled with by ignorant quacks and ridiculous pretenders—not their money. We need no Sir James Graham's bill in the profession of the law. Besides, it is not the good opinion of an uninformed public which the barrister has to seek or to depend upon. A lawyer, he is judged by lawyers. It is in the estimation of attorneys and solicitors that he must rise—not that of respectable ladies and nervous baronets. They stand between him and that unlearned public to which the physician, on the contrary, at once appeals.

The very circumstance, however, that there is no such public course of instruction marked out, and no prospective examination to be prepared for—that all is to be gained from that silent array of books which fill the long shelves of a legal library or from those chambers of the practitioner which, to those who look at them from without, seem as dark with mystery as they are with dust and smoke—this, we repeat, renders such a guide-book as that which Mr Warren has presented to the public, almost indispensable. In forming a critical estimation of his labours on this publication, it would be extremely unfair to forget, for a moment, the peculiar nature of the work. He is writing for the young. It is an elementary treatise. It is a book peculiarly practical; the very opposite of whatever is theoretical or speculative. If the style is somewhat more diffuse than we should on all occasions approve, we are far from regarding this as a defect here. The work, amongst other advantages, presents really a storehouse of that useful phraseology in which a public speaker should abound, that phraseology which lies between the familiarity of business and the pomp of oratory. And if, as we may perhaps be tempted again to remark, there is something too much of laudation of that profession and of that system of jurisprudence to which he is introducing the young aspirant, this too is a bias to which, in the present work, it would be ungracious to raise an objection. An elementary teacher should not chill and discourage his pupils by criticisms of a cold and censorious character; he should rather exercise his penetration in drawing into light concealed excellences. In this Mr Warren follows the example of the first of all commentators, the most successful of all teachers—Blackstone; who continues to be the most popular of all expounders of the law, even though the system that he expounds has almost deserted him. It seems that the law can be made obsolete, but not the commentary. With a pupil it is a thing understood and agreed upon that he is to learn the system as it now exists; to engage him to do this it were bad policy to decry that system, and expose its faults with a merciless analysis. When the student has mastered it as a lesson, he may then overlook and criticise it with what severity he thinks fit. We will quote a passage which will illustrate at once the lively manner of our writer, and also this happy Blackstonian tendency—the habit of animadverting very gravely on those errors of the law which have been reformed, and remaining still "a little blind" to those which are yet untouched.

"Down to the year 1832, the system of common law pleading and practice supplied the student, during the greater period of his pupilage, with little else than the most degrading and unprofitable drudgery. It presented to his despairing eyes a mass of vile verbiage—a tortuous complexity of detail, which defied the efforts of any but the most creeping ingenuity and industry. There was really every thing to discourage and disgust a liberal and enlightened mind, however well inured to labour by the invigorating discipline of logic and mathematics. The deep and clear waters—so to speak—of legal principle, there always were, and will be, for they are immutable and eternal; but you had to buffet your way to them through "many a mile of foaming filth," that harassed, exhausted and choked the unhappy swimmer long before he could get sight of the offing. Few beside those who had had the equivocal advantage of being early familiarised with such gibberish as "special general imparlance"—"special testatum capias"—"special original"—"testatum pone"—"protestando"—"colour"—"de bene esse," &c. &c. &c. could obtain a glimmering of daily practice, without a serious waste of time and depreciation of the mental faculties. Let the thousands who, under the old system, almost at once adopted and abandoned legal studies, attest the truth of this remark. There was, in short, every thing to discourage a gentleman from entering, to obstruct him in prosecuting, the legal profession. Recently, however, a great change has been effected. There has been a real reform—a practical, searching, comprehensive reform of the common law; a shaking down of innumerable dead leaves and rotten branches; a cutting away of all the shoots of prurient vegetation, which served but to disfigure the tree, and to conceal and injure its fruit. Now you may see, in the common law, a tree noble in its height and figure, sinewy in its branches, green in its foliage, and goodly in its fruit. May it be permitted, however, to express an humble hope, that the gardener will know when to lay aside his knife!"—(P. 20.)

And yet Warren has a knife, too, of his own which he would willingly employ upon some part of this noble tree—either its old or its new branches. It is impossible for even the most indulgent commentator not to perceive that there are in our system of pleading many technicalities, which, so far from being necessary to the administration of justice, have no other operation than to retard, to complicate, to defeat the administration of justice. At p. 738—a very prudent and respectful distance from the quotation we have just made—we find the following admission:—

"Such is a faint sketch of the existing system of special pleading, upon the reform and remodelling of which has been bestowed, during the last fifteen years, the anxious and profound consideration of some of the ablest and most experienced legal intellects which were ever addressed to such an undertaking, or concerned in the practice or administration of the law. Their alterations were bold and extensive, and perhaps may be said to have been, to the same extent, successful. The principal objects proposed to be effected by the late changes were enumerated in an early part of this work, where also was given a general account of all the late changes effected in the department of Common Law pleading and practice. To this we now refer the reader; and also to the Appendix (No. IV.), where will be found, in extenso, the Rules of Court by which these great alterations were effected. While the principal objects of the framers of them have been accomplished, by effecting a great saving of expense in the length of the pleadings, and their incidents; by securing an economical and satisfactory trial at Nisi Prius, through the precise and specific nature of the issues required to be presented to the jury, and the effectual expedients resorted to, for the purpose of saving an unnecessary expenditure in obtaining evidence: it cannot be denied that the excessive stringency of the rules which restrict a plaintiff to a single count in respect of a single cause of action, and a defendant to a single plea in support of a single ground of defence, too frequently operates most injuriously, so as to secure the defeat of justice. It is continually a matter of serious difficulty, to refer a particular combination of facts to their appropriate legal category; and if the wrong one should be selected, substantial justice is sacrificed before arbitrary legal technicality. It would be easy to illustrate the truth of these remarks by reference to cases of daily occurrence. The rule in question must either be relaxed, or its injurious effects neutralized by greatly enlarged powers of amendment conferred upon the judge at Nisi Prius. With all these defects, however, it cannot be denied that the recent changes in the law of pleading, evidence, and practice, with reference to the interests of suitors, have justified the most sanguine anticipations of those who set in motion the machinery which effected those changes; and with reference to students and practitioners, have tended to exact a far greater amount of diligence, learning, and acuteness, than for a long series of years has been deemed requisite."

Mr Warren's illustrations, whether imaginary, or drawn from experience and observation, are always, as might be expected, graphic and amusing. It is thus that he exemplifies a very useful precept, which he gives to the young student for the bar:—

"He must very early familiarise himself with the correct meaning of at least the leading technical terms of Logic—which are of frequent use in the courts—not for petty pedantry or display, but from their real advantage—from, indeed, the necessity of the case. Instances of the vexatious consequences of ignorance in these matters will not unfrequently fall under the notice of a watchful observer. Some two or three years ago, a counsel, manifestly not having enjoyed a very superior education, was engaged in arguing a case, in banco, at Westminster—before four very able judges, one of them being a man remarkable for his logical acuteness and dexterity. 'No, no—that won't do,' said he, suddenly interposing—'put the converse of the proposition, Mr ——: try it that way.' The judge paused: the counsel too paused, while a slight expression of uneasiness flitted over his features. He expected the judge to 'put the converse' for him; but the judge did not. 'Put the converse of the proposition, Mr ——, and see if that will hold'—repeated the judge with some surprise, and a little peremptoriness in his tone. But it was unpleasantly obvious that Mr —— could not 'put the converse' of the proposition—nor understand what as meant. Some better informed brother barrister whispered to him the converse of the proposition—but it was useless: Mr —— faltered—repeated a word or two, as if mechanically—'Well!' said the judge, kindly suspecting the true state of the case, 'go on with your argument, Mr ——!' It may appear strange that so glaring a case should occur at the bar—but, nevertheless, such a case did occur, and such cases have occurred, and are likely to occur again, as long as persons of inferior education come, intrepid in ignorance, to the bar."

We think, however, that Mr Warren is a little too hard upon the unfortunate orator, who was not aware of the meaning of the "converse of the proposition," and that the judge might as well have "put it" himself. A man may be a very good reasoner who has not learned "to name his tools," which is all that is taught by the logic of Aristotle.

How evidently is the following invested with all the vivid colouring of actual observation:—

"It can hardly be necessary, after all that has been said upon the subject of special pleading, both in this chapter and in preceding parts of the work, to warn the youth who rashly rushes to the bar without a competent knowledge of pleading, of the folly of which he is guilty, and the danger to which he is exposing himself. To a young counsel ignorant of pleading, a brief will be little else than a sort of Chinese puzzle. He must either give up in despair all attempts at mastering its contents, or hurry in ridiculous agitation from friend to friend, making vain efforts to 'cram' himself for some occasion of solitary display, afforded him by the zealous indiscretion of a friendly solicitor. Feverish with anxiety, wretched under the apprehension of public failure, and the consciousness of incompetence, after trembling in court lest he should be called upon to show himself, he returns to chambers, to curse his folly—to make, when too late, exertions to retrieve his false position, or abandon it for ever, with all the cloud-picturings of a vain and puerile ambition."

There is a general reluctance to believe in the union of literary talents and business-like qualities of mind. They are thought incompatible. A lover of literature is held to have little chance of success. A prejudice so general must have some foundation; but the incompatibility, in whatever degree it exists, lies, we are persuaded, not in the several mental qualities—not in the intellectual apparatus fitted for the two careers of literature and a profession—but in the different dispositions, in the diversity of tastes, which the two pursuits engender. The literary man fails in no faculty that profession calls for, but he may contract a strong repugnance for the species of activity it demands.

In literature thought is indulged and solicited for its own sake; it excites or it amuses; it may be invested with the deepest and most stirring interests of religion and philosophy, or it may be the very rainbow of the mind, having no life but only in and for its beauty. In professional vocations the intellectual effort is subordinated to a definite and fixed purpose; it is the purpose, not the thought, which must continually animate our exertions; and the purpose binds down the current of thought rigidly to its own service. Literature is the luxury of the spirit, the free aristocratic life of intellectual pleasure; profession is the useful but fettered existence of the sons of toil. In the one, the spirit revels as a mountain stream that leaps in the face of heaven from crag to crag; in the other, it is the same stream, lower down, confined in narrow channel, and half-buried by the ponderous wheel-work of that ever-clacking mill which it has to turn.

What wonder, then, that the literary man should have certain disgusts to overcome when he is called on to forsake his own free and variable life, for a mode of existence where thought is no longer her own mistress, but, with constant repetition, must take service in the mechanism of society? And he does often recalcitrate. But when, owing to some overruling motive of ambition or necessity, this distaste is overcome, it is an immense advantage which the possessor of literary talents has over the ordinary practitioner of any profession. In that of the law it has been especially remarked, that those who have been most eminently successful have confessed to the repugnance they had, in the first instance, to conquer; and such examples of eminent success have, for the most part, consisted of men who had betrayed a decided talent and aptitude for literature.

The writer whom we have before us is a striking instance of literary tastes being irresistibly borne down by the craving after active life, and, perhaps, a strong impulse of ambition. The present work is sufficient to testify that, however vivid his imagination, his patience is still greater. We know him to be one of those who abhor rest, who court fatigue, to whom the utmost drudgery becomes welcome when invested with the interest of an immediate practical purpose. To one of such a stamp, literature could only prove a sort of apprenticeship to cultivate and develope his mind, not to determine his career. And so it has been. It was in vain that nature placed the pencil in his hand; she could not win him to the repose of the artist; his spirit was already pledged to a life of action, of toil, of hope, of enterprise. All along he has chosen the path of forensic ambition, nor, when most exerting his fancy, has he ever swerved from the goal. May success await him in his laborious course! May he be landed high and dry upon the envied eminences of social life! But—by Jupiter!—if nature had given us the pencil of the artist, we would not have let go our hold, though the seals of office were ten times as large and ten times as brilliant as they are, and were dangled before us within arm's-reach. You might have lifted us softly and gently, and placed us as with a mother's arms, even upon the broad woolsack, we would not have dropped that pencil. No; we would have said to the boisterous prosperities of life—Here is that which will make station indifferent; if to food and raiment men must needs add the charms of variety, here is that which will gild even obscurity with an assured and tranquil pride!

As we have intimated, we do not feel disposed to blame our author that he speaks often of his "glorious," his "noble" profession. The golden hue of sunrise is rightly cast upon the pinnacles and towers of that city the traveller is toiling to reach. What narrow and squalid streets, what blind alleys, what there is of filth and ruin in the great capital of intelligence, he may find out afterwards for himself. There was a time when we, too, were younger than we are, and saw the proud city at the same advantageous distance, when, dazzled by the view of its more conspicuous ornaments, we might have been tempted to make the same exclamations, and to use the same flattering phraseology. At that time, if any one had thrown a shadow of moral blame on the very principle and universal practice of the profession of advocacy, we should have indignantly repelled the accusation, we should have rushed to its defence, perhaps we even did attempt to throw our little shield before its huge and very vulnerable body. But now—when some years have rolled over our heads, and we have learned to think more calmly, if not more wisely—when we have caught a glimpse of the men who fill high places, and stood near enough to discover that they were of earth's common mould—when the actual din of forensic oratory, deafening and monotonous, has rung in our ears, and we have sat and watched the solemn juggle, and the stale hypocrisy with which that legal strife called a trial is conducted—now, if any teacher of ethics should denounce the demoralizing principle of advocacy—the principle we mean of contending for any client, or any cause, that craves fee in hand—we should no longer be eager to thrust ourselves between him and the object of his indignation; we should let his wrath take its course; we should listen with patience, with neutrality, perhaps with secret satisfaction at his attack. What, after all, is to be said in answer to the reproach which every simple-minded man must make—not against this or that member of the profession, because an individual is always considered blameless who only adopts the customs of his country—but against the whole profession, the principle and theory of its action, this arguing for A or B, for Yes or No, as they first come, without the least regard for justice or for truth?

It is well known what Paley has said in its defence. "There are falsehoods," he writes in his chapter on Lies, "which are not lies, that is, which are not criminal; as, 1. when no one is deceived—which is the case in parables, fables, novels, jests, tales to create mirth, ludicrous embellishments of a story, where the declared design of the speaker is not to inform but to divert; compliments in the subscription of a letter, a servant's denying his master, a prisoner pleading not guilty, and an advocate asserting the justice, or his belief of the justice, of his client's cause. In such instances no confidence is destroyed, because none was reposed; no promise to speak the truth is violated, because none was given or understood to be given."

Ay, but the advocate does strive to be believed—does labour to deceive. His very object is to gain credit for his assertion, whether contrary or not to his sense of truth. He stands there, it is true, in the character of advocate, subject to whatever suspicion you may attach to that character; but all his ability is employed to overcome that suspicion, and compel you to credit him. "Confidence is not reposed;" not readily it may be; he labours, therefore, the more assiduously to win it. How can he avail himself of the plea here offered for him? How can he place himself in the sane category with the portly merchant who signs himself "your humble servant," and would indeed be strangely surprised if you took him at his word? Or with the obedient valet who denies his master with the customary, "not at home?" No man uses language with a more evident desire to obtain our conviction than the advocate.

There is another so-called theory of advocacy, which we will state in the words of Bishop Warburton. In his Divine Legation, vol. i. p. 397, he says, speaking of Cicero—"As an orator, he was an advocate for his client, or, more properly, personated him. Here, then, without question, he was to feign and dissimulate his own opinions, and speak those of his client. And though some of those who call themselves casuists, have held it unlawful for an advocate to defend what he thinks an ill cause, yet I apprehend it to be the natural right of every member of society, whether accusing or accused, to speak freely and fully for himself. And if, either by a legal or natural incapacity, this cannot be done in person, to have a proxy provided or allowed by the state to do for him what he cannot or may not do for himself. I apprehend that all states have done it, and that every advocate is such a proxy."

This explanation goes far. Of a certainty, every man has a right to approach a court of justice with such plea, or such demand, as the law gives him. For his ultimate aims, for his moral purposes in so doing, he alone is responsible. We do not desire the barrister so to prejudge the cause of the litigant as to decide whether or not he ought, as a moral man, to carry it into a court of justice. Let his plea, or his demand, be laid before the tribunal of his country, and as he cannot, in the complicated state of our jurisprudence, do this for himself, it is right and equitable that there should be professional men whose function it is to do this for him. But it follows not that the professional man is to pledge his own personal convictions in every case he undertakes. Let him speak in the name of his client, let him limit himself to the office of interpreter, where his own convictions do not allow him to be the zealous advocate. The state ought to give to every man free access to a court of justice, and to all the armoury of the law; how he uses the weapons he finds there, he must account to God and his own conscience, and the moral judgment of society; but the state is not to give to every rogue the benefit of the apparent convictions in his favour, of a learned and honorable gentleman. If the barrister speaks, and is understood to speak, as from his client, and not from his own conviction, the indiscriminate advocacy of causes which the administration of justice requires, is reconcilable with the manifest claims of morality. But not otherwise. To lend out the zeal of truth to varnish every cause, is what no system of jurisprudence demands, and what no system of ethics can tolerate. Yet this is what is done.

If a conveyancer is instructed to draw a will which appears to him unjust, he must feel some pain in so doing; but it is not a pain of conscience, for it is not his office to compel people to make equitable wills. It is an office which, at the distance he stands from the parties, and with his limited knowledge of their character and mutual relationships, he could not possibly undertake; he would be a mere disturber of the peace of society if he attempted to regulate the morality of all the conveyances and testaments that he drew. It would indeed be a doctrine destructive of all order, and of the very machinery of society, that would, as a general rule, impose upon men of profession, or of trade, the responsibilities which lie, in the first instance, upon the consciences of their clients. A man could not sell a piece of whipcord from his shop, without having an assurance from the customer that he was not buying it to strangle his wife withal. The conveyancer, therefore, quietly pursues his instructions, and draws the will. In the like manner, if a barrister is instructed to plead the statute of limitations to a debt, it is no concern of his if the client is not acting in a conscientious manner in taking advantage of the statute. The law gives him this plea, and it is not for the jurist to debar him the use of it. He presents it, therefore, to the court. But if, not content with pleading the statute of limitations for a client who employs the law to escape from a moral obligation, he labours to convince the jury that, in availing himself of this plea, his client is acting in a very honourable, or at least in no blamable manner; if, by an artful colouring of the facts, or by insinuations against other parties, he contrives to lead the culprit in triumph through the court, then we say that a baseness is committed by the advocate, for which there is no excuse, in the constitution of courts of justice, nor in the subtleties of casuistry.

Those who have expatiated on the duty of the barrister to do all for his client, be that client whom he may, have generally taken care to place before us the cases of political prosecution, where the advocate appears to act a brave and generous part in opposing the government and the legal officers of the crown. By dexterously keeping the small cases in view while they were enlarging on the broad principle of indiscriminate advocacy, they have often contrived to give to this principle itself an air of generosity; as if the barrister were performing a noble self-sacrifice, were devoting himself in a quite heroic manner, by giving himself, head and heart, voice and intelligence, to the first distressed applicant for his aid. It is only by referring to the political nature of the occasion on which it was delivered, that we can account for the following splendid exaggeration of Lord Brougham's upon this subject:—

"An advocate, by the sacred duty which he owes his client, knows, in the discharge of that office, but one person in the world, that client and none other. To save that client by all expedient means—to protect that client at all hazards and costs to all others, and among others to himself—is the highest and most unquestioned of his duties; and he must not regard the alarm, the suffering, the torment, the destruction, which he may bring upon any other. Nay, separating even the duties of a patriot from those of an advocate, and casting them, if need be, to the wind, he must go on, reckless of the consequences, if his fate it should unhappily be to involve his country in confusion for his client's protection."

This piece of eloquent absurdity was delivered on the trial of Queen Caroline, and the speaker was playing the advocate at the time he delivered it. But Lord Brougham would not surely speak or write in the same strain upon other and more ordinary occasions—if, for instance, the client, for whom the country was to be involved in confusion, was a railway company![15]

Every man has something to be said for him in the way of defence or palliation; we have no objection to every man having his advocate in Westminster Hall; but we are persuaded that public opinion is far too indulgent to this "glorious and noble" profession, when it permits its members, speaking as from their own conviction, to sport with truth to any extent that may be serviceable to their clients. A more temperate zeal, which should not overstep what the interest of justice demands, would indeed be less munificently rewarded; but, in every other respect, it would be a clear gain both to the cause of public morality and the administration of the laws.

But that which, perhaps, more frequently calls up a feeling of pain and humiliation in the barrister, is that for which he is not at all responsible; namely, the nature of those legal weapons the employment of which his client has a right to demand of him. The rules of pleading and of evidence have been lately much simplified and improved, and they will, year after year, be still further improved; but they still furnish the willing or the unwilling advocate with abundant obstructions to the fair investigation of truth. Speaking of pleading, Mr Warren has very truly said, in a passage we have already quoted—"It is continually a matter of serious difficulty to refer a particular combination of facts to their appropriate legal category; and, if the wrong one should be selected, substantial justice is sacrificed before arbitrary legal technicality." A glance at these "legal categories" will fully bear out the statement which our author has here so temperately made. Let us open the justly lauded book of Mr Stephen, "On the Principles of Pleading"—a work which every man, lawyer or not, who receives a gratification from clear and logical statements, may take pleasure in perusing. We extract the following account of personal actions:—

"Of personal actions, the most common are the following—Debt, covenant, detinue, trespass, trespass on the case, replevin.

"The action of debt lies where a party claims the recovery of a debt, i. e. a liquidated or certain sum of money alleged to be due to him.

"The action of covenant lies where a party claims damages for a breach of covenant, i. e. of a promise under seal.

"The action of detinue lies where the party claims the specific recovery of goods and chattels, or deeds and writings detained from him.

"The action of trespass lies where a party claims damages for a trespass against him. A trespass is an injury committed with violence."

Having described these, the author comes to one which requires to have its history told before it can be rendered intelligible. This is still not unfrequently the case in our law; instead of a definition founded on the nature of things, and growing out of the science itself of jurisprudence, we are presented with a narrative to tell us how the matter came about.

"The action of trespass on the case lies where a party sues for damages for any wrong or cause of complaint to which covenant or trespass will not apply. This action originated in the power given by the statute of Westminster 2, to the clerks of the chancery to frame new writs in consimili casu with writs already known.... Such being the nature of the action, it comprises, of course, many different species. There are two, however, of more frequent use than any other species of trespass on the case, or, perhaps than any other form of action whatever. These are Assumpsit and Trover.

"The action of assumpsit lies where a party claims damages for breach of simple contract, i. e. a promise not under seal."

The action of trover differs from detinue inasmuch as the party claims damages, not the recovery of the identical goods and chattels. With the action of replevin we will not trouble our readers, to whom we ought, perhaps, to apologise for entering thus far into legal technicalities.

But now, reflect a moment on this classification. A promise under seal must assuredly require a different proof from a promise not under seal; but what end is answered by calling one an action of covenant and the other an action of assumpsit? Or what good result can arise from limiting the definition of debt to the claim of a sum certain? Who sees not what a snare may be here laid for the feet of unwary suitors? The names of trover, detinue, trespass, give no information to the defendant; the substantial cause of action is stated in the declaration, and these names are mere useless additions. Yet the right name must be chosen, or it is fatal to the suit. If trespass be adopted instead of trespass on the case, the error is fatal; and yet mark how lucid, how intelligible, how satisfactory is the classification designated by these terms of art.

Trespass is the proper form of action when the injury has been committed with violence This looks sufficiently distinct. But then the violence may be either actual or implied; and the law will imply violence wherever the injury is direct, and the property injured of a tangible nature. In the most stealthy, peaceable entrance upon another man's land, the law implies violence. What, therefore, may or may not be said, in the usual phrase, to be done vi et armis, remains to be known, by no means from the nature of the facts themselves, but from arbitrary decisions of courts. To make out a class of actions as those committed with violence, and then to imply violence where in reality there is none, is first to make and then unmake the distinction. And yet, as some distinction is, for the embarrassment of suitors, to be retained, this implication of violence is restricted to cases where the injury is direct and not consequential; and what shall be denominated a direct and what a consequential injury, is again a matter of no small difficulty. Moreover, in order to sustain trespass, the property injured must be of a corporeal nature. It would be a sad solecism in the eye of the law to allow a man to bring trespass on account of his tithes—this being, according to definition, an incorporeal property, and from its nature, therefore, not subject to violence.

This barbarous nomenclature of actions might be swept away at once with considerable advantage. If the plaintiff "complaining" of the defendant, proceeded at once to a brief statement of his cause of action, this would answer all the purposes of pleading. It was said by the commissioners in the third report on the common law, that an abolition of these distinctions would entail "much uncertainty on the right of action." With utmost deference to the commissioners, this is a very strange assertion. These categories are known only to the lawyers; and surely a student of the law cannot be at a loss to distinguish the substantial ground of action from a mere formulary of pleading. A layman may often imagine he has a right of action where he has none. Did the commissioners mean gravely to assert that these categories, of which he knows nothing—or whether he knows them or not—could enlighten him as to the redress he is entitled to in a court of justice?

It is, however, in the inexhaustible armoury of quibble and objection which the law of evidence supplies him with that the generous advocate must feel the greatest amount of embarrassment and repugnance. It is his office to stand at the door of testimony, and thrust back every witness, and reject every document, he can, upon pleas which, whatever their original ground or design, he very well knows do not impeach the real value of the evidence rejected. But into this topic we must not enter. It is not our present object to write upon the reform of the laws. The subject would lead us much too far.

One general remark only we will venture to make. Neither in nor out of the profession must men yet be impatient with the frequent changes that our laws undergo. Though, in common with our author, we estimate highly a settled state of things, and have to deprecate the rashness of some too hasty legislators, we cannot yet "lay aside the knife." They are very inconvenient these partial changes, but there is no other mode of proceeding. Whilst we are living in the very city which we have to improve, and in great part to rebuild, what else can we do but pull down here and there a street at a time, and reconstruct it on a better plan? It is miserable work this pulling down. One is blinded by dust—one loses one's way; all seems ruin and confusion. But the new street rises—the rubbish is removed—the dust is laid; one finds one's way again, and finds it twice as short as before. It is only by successive changes of this kind that the great city of our jurisprudence can be adapted to the wants of its multiplied and changed inhabitants.

We ought perhaps to mention, that Mr Warren has been discreetly silent on some of the topics to which we have ventured to allude. He has very wisely avoided all questions of casuistry; and we trust that, in our glances on the moral position of the bar, we shall not be thought to have manifested any want of respect for a learned body, the members of which, in their individual character, stand as high in our estimation as those of any body whatever, and which, as a whole, presents a greater array of talent than in any other denomination of men could be met with. We revert once more to Mr Warren's very useful, able, and praiseworthy publication to wish him success, not only in this undertaking, which may be already said to be crowned with success, but in the still greater and more laborious enterprise which he has on foot, and which this specimen of his legal authorship shows him fully competent to achieve.

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