Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 71, No. 437, March 1852

by Various

CHAPTER IX.

Violante's first evening at the Lansmeres, had seemed happier to her than the first evening, under the same roof, had done to Helen. True that she missed her father much—Jemima somewhat; but she so identified her father's cause with Harley, that she had a sort of vague feeling that it was to promote that cause that she was on this visit to Harley's parents. And the Countess, it must be owned, was more emphatically cordial to her than she had ever yet been to Captain Digby's orphan. But perhaps the real difference in the heart of either girl was this, that Helen felt awe of Lady Lansmere, and Violante felt only love for Lord L'Estrange's mother. Violante, too, was one of those persons whom a reserved and formal person, like the Countess, "can get on with," as the phrase goes. Not so poor little Helen—so shy herself, and so hard to coax into more than gentle monosyllables. And Lady Lansmere's favourite talk was always of Harley. Helen had listened to such talk with respect and interest. Violante listened to it with inquisitive eagerness—with blushing delight. The mother's heart noticed the distinction between the two, and no wonder that that heart moved more to Violante than to Helen. Lord Lansmere, too, like most gentlemen of his age, clumped all young ladies together, as a harmless, amiable, but singularly stupid class of the genus-Petticoat, meant to look pretty, play the piano, and talk to each other about frocks and sweethearts. Therefore this animated dazzling creature, with her infinite variety of look and play of mind, took him by surprise, charmed him into attention, and warmed him into gallantry. Helen sate in her quiet corner, at her work, sometimes listening with almost mournful, though certainly unenvious, admiration at Violante's vivid, yet ever unconscious, eloquence of word and thought—sometimes plunged deep into her own secret meditations. And all the while the work went on the same, under the small noiseless fingers. This was one of Helen's habits that irritated the nerves of Lady Lansmere. She despised young ladies who were fond of work. She did not comprehend how often it is the resource of the sweet womanly mind, not from want of thought, but from the silence and the depth of it. Violante was surprised, and perhaps disappointed, that Harley had left the house before dinner, and did not return all the evening. But Lady Lansmere, in making excuse for his absence, on the plea of engagements, found so good an opportunity to talk of his ways in general—of his rare promise in boyhood—of her regret at the inaction of his maturity—of her hope to see him yet do justice to his natural powers, that Violante almost ceased to miss him.

And when Lady Lansmere conducted her to her room, and, kissing her cheek tenderly, said, "But you are just the person Harley admires—just the person to rouse him from melancholy dreams, of which his wild humours are now but the vain disguise"—Violante crossed her arms on her bosom, and her bright eyes, deepened into tenderness, seemed to ask, "He melancholy—and why?"

On leaving Violante's room, Lady Lansmere paused before the door of Helen's; and, after musing a little while, entered softly.

Helen had dismissed her maid, and, at the moment Lady Lansmere entered, she was kneeling at the foot of the bed, her hands clasped before her face.

Her form, thus seen, looked so youthful and child-like—the attitude itself was so holy and so touching, that the proud and cold expression on Lady Lansmere's face changed. She shaded the light involuntarily, and seated herself in silence, that she might not disturb the act of prayer.

When Helen rose, she was startled to see the Countess seated by the fire; and hastily drew her hand across her eyes. She had been weeping.

Lady Lansmere did not, however, turn to observe those traces of tears, which Helen feared were too visible. The Countess was too absorbed in her own thoughts; and as Helen timidly approached, she said—still with her eyes on the clear low fire—"I beg your pardon, Miss Digby, for my intrusion; but my son has left it to me to prepare Lord Lansmere to learn the offer you have done Harley the honour to accept. I have not yet spoken to my lord; it may be days before I find a fitting occasion to do so; meanwhile, I feel assured that your sense of propriety will make you agree with me that it is due to Lord L'Estrange's father, that strangers should not learn arrangements of such moment in his family, before his own consent be obtained."

Here the Countess came to a full pause; and poor Helen, finding herself called upon for some reply to this chilling speech, stammered out, scarce audibly—

"Certainly, madam, I never dreamed of—"

"That is right, my dear," interrupted Lady Lansmere, rising suddenly, and as if greatly relieved. "I could not doubt your superiority to ordinary girls of your age, with whom these matters are never secret for a moment. Therefore, of course, you will not mention, at present, what has passed between you and Harley, to any of the friends with whom you may correspond."

"I have no correspondents—no friends, Lady Lansmere," said Helen deprecatingly, and trying hard not to cry.

"I am very glad to hear it, my dear; young ladies never should have. Friends, especially friends who correspond, are the worst enemies they can have. Good night, Miss Digby. I need not add, by the way, that, though we are bound to show all kindness to this young Italian lady, still she is wholly unconnected with our family; and you will be as prudent with her as you would have been with your correspondents—had you had the misfortune to have any."

Lady Lansmere said the last words with a smile, and pressed a reluctant kiss (the stepmother's kiss) on Helen's bended brow. She then left the room, and Helen sate on the seat vacated by the stately unloving form, and again covered her face with her hands, and again wept. But when she rose at last, and the light fell upon her face, that soft face was sad indeed, but serene—serene, as if with some inward sense of duty—sad, as with the resignation which accepts patience instead of hope.

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[ENGLISH ADMINISTRATIONS.][6]

The last century was the era of monarchs. The people had not yet formed a visible object. They were the counters at the table of the great gamesters of the day. In England, which had since the Reformation always advanced before the age, the people had started into substantial existence. It was impossible totally to overlook a power which had subverted one Constitution, and erected another—which had dethroned one dynasty, and enthroned another—which had begun its existence under theories of divine right, and signalised the maturity of its generation by establishing the most perfect national freedom which man had ever seen.

But, in continental Europe, the people formed no more an object, in the general polity of nations, than a submarine mountain takes its place in a map of the ocean. It had an existence, but no recognition; it had a place, but the ship of the State passed over it without casting the lead or shifting a sail. The government of all foreign nations existed only in the Council Chamber. The king was at once the author and the agent of all measures; the decrees of the administration were as mysterious, as inscrutable, and as unexpected, as Oracles. Men saw nothing in the political world but kingdoms—masses of power—revolving before the eye of the politician and the philosopher, as the planets revolved, with irresistible force, with vast and various splendour, but by laws as much beyond human dispute as the Laws of Nature.

The maxim which in our day is felt to contain the consummation of despotism, L'Etat—c'est moi, was once the motto of every throne, the essential character of dominion, the crown jewel, the substance of the sceptre. Whether that maxim is to be revived—whether the struggle between popular power and the throne is once more to be tried—whether the monarchies of Europe, unwarned by the rents already made in their ramparts by the comparatively slight incursions of the popular surge, are prepared to defy the ocean in its strength, must be left to the future.

But there can be no doubt in the prediction, that whenever the ultimate conflict arrives, it will be tremendous; it will shake all the old barriers of power, and either cover society with ruin, or sweep away the ruin itself, for a total renovation.

It is difficult to touch upon this subject without some reference to that country which, for the last fifty years, has gone the whole round of revolution—has lived in an atmosphere of fiery vapours—has been acclimated to epidemics of overthrow—and reckons her years by the flight of monarchs, the fabrication of hollow governments, and the crush of constitutions.

France seems resolved on making the dreadful experiment of Despotism. It failed before, and its failure consigned the Imperial experimentalist to a fate so singular and so condign, as to seem a direct punishment from Providence for daring to counteract its purposes in the progress of man. With his successor to his principles, the experiment is but beginning. How will it end? He has invoked a spirit that had been laid these thirty years. Whether, like the magicians of old, he must find employment for the demon, under the penalty of being in his grasp, or he is finally to evade the bond, no man within memory has placed himself and his country in a more trying and threatening dilemma. If he attempts to make war his policy, he will be guilty of every drop of blood shed in the field. If he attempts to re-establish despotism, he has the warning of St Helena before his eyes.

But, without conjecturing the personal fate of this man of power, nothing can be clearer than the fact that he has placed himself in a position to mould the fate of Europe for a century to come. If he shall succeed in concentrating all national power in himself, the example is sure not to be lost upon kings. The insults which characterised the triumphs of the mob in the late Continental tumults—the remembrances which must rankle in the hearts of all Continental governments—the revenge, which is the natural passion of arbitrary power—and even the rational alarm at the possible return of the popular excesses, must make all foreign princes partial to the revival of Despotism.

This hour is a Crisis. Principles are on their trial; the antagonists are in the field; and the first shock may decide, for a long period, the victory of bold measures over impassioned men, and of unlimited might over confused, but daring, and defeated, but obstinate, right—a contest which will never wholly cease henceforth, and which, in its continuance, may shatter the whole frame of society.

How far this great political change in the most influential of kingdoms may be but the indication of a new course of Providence—how far it may be connected with those new and singular means and powers of nature and of mechanism which, in our time, have been assigned to man—how far it may be, in politics, a corresponding phase to the railroad, the electric telegraph, and the discoveries of gold in the ends of the earth—can be only a matter of conjecture; but while we are convinced that Providence does nothing without system, and does nothing in vain, we cannot altogether suppress the feeling, that an Era of Revelations in government, science, and society, has begun.

But it must be acknowledged that the monarchs of the last century bore their honours well. They were all bold, brave, and intelligent. Whether in the right or the wrong, they showed decision—the first qualification for the government of kingdoms. Some were of remarkable intellectual power, and none, with slight exceptions, were inferior to the weight of the diadem. The age which reckoned among its sovereigns, Frederic II. of Prussia, Maria Theresa of Germany, the Emperor Joseph, the Czarina Catherine, and, in its earlier portion, Louis XIV. and William III., could not be regarded as destitute of minds equal to the conduct of affairs in perhaps the most complicated, struggling, and difficult period of Europe before the French Revolution.

The reign of George II. formed a strong contrast to those of the Continental sovereigns: their difficulties arose from war—his from peace; their combats in the field were scarcely less anxious than his in the cabinet. The conclusion was different; the successes and failure of the foreign monarch equally wasted the blood and treasure of Europe; the struggles of the British king issued in larger accessions to liberty, and to the power of that body which is politically called the people.

George II. was a stern and stubborn man, possessed of considerable ability, but unpopular in its application; unimpassioned, but ambitious of fame; longing to figure in war, but compelled by the nation to peace; uneasy in England, and never happy but in Hanover, from which he imported his prejudices and his favourites, his politics and his household; fond of power, but capable of complying with the public will; and retaining all the feelings of a German Elector, yet respectful to the laws of a limited monarchy. Whatever were the morals of the court, he never sought to make them the fashion in England; and whatever might be his own sense of decorum, he governed his people with dignity, dying at the age of seventy-seven; and, after a reign of thirty-four years, he was, if not loved, regretted by the empire.

The volumes which have recalled us to this subject consist of the correspondence of George Grenville, Lord Temple, and their chief contemporaries—among the rest, the celebrated Earl of Chatham. It extends from 1742 to the tenth year of George III., and is peculiarly important in its references to the last seventeen years of that period.

It has long been the custom of the leading English families in public life to preserve the documents connected with their career. This habit exists, perhaps, to a greater extent in England than in any other country, from the superior nature of public character, from the frequency of public investigation, from the severity of public judgment, and, as the general result, from the importance of having a ready defence of the statesman's reputation against the casual charge as well as the studied libel.

The history of the present deposit may be briefly told. Earl Temple's papers were always kept at Stowe, the well-known and superb mansion of the Buckingham family. A considerable portion of Mr Grenville's correspondence, preserved at Wotton, was brought to Stowe, and arranged with that of Earl Temple, and the remainder was discovered by the editor, in a large chest at Buckingham House, which had remained unopened since it was brought there. The whole of these papers were rearranged by the late Duke, with the assistance of the editor, (then librarian at Stowe,) but with the ducal wish that they should not be published before the death of his uncle, the Right Hon. Thomas Grenville. The latter, however, surviving the Duke seven years, the publication was retarded till, by the present Duke, it was committed to the hands of the editor, in conformity with the intention of his father.

In England in the last century there were castes as marked as in India: there was a military caste, a class of society in which the generality of the military commissions, and all the leading employments of the court, went; there was also a political caste, a class in which all the great offices of administration went, as regularly as the night succeeded the day, and in which any deviation from the routine, any appointment of any individual not in the muster-roll of the aristocracy, would probably have been considered as a deviation from the law of nature. In this condition of things, men of other classes had no imaginable chance of prominent office on their own account. Their only hope must be in attaching themselves to some of those "Dii majorum gentium"—those sons of fortune, those hereditary possessors of high positions, those natural rulers of the powers and the privileges of political high life. The government, in consequence, was an Oligarchy under the name of a monarchy, and the authority of the Crown was merged in the actual authority of the political connection.

The monarch had, undoubtedly, the right to choose, but it was the right to choose between submitting to the captain of the ship and going over the side. He might appoint his cabinet, but he must appoint it from the men whom the political class offered; he could not stray into the world for a better selection; he could not follow the man of talents, or the man of integrity, into the less nobly born and less dexterously combined orders of society: there stood the aristocratic recruits for his government, and unless he took them as they were, he was a general without an army. The advantages and disadvantages of this system were equally conspicuous. On the one view, ministers were not the creatures of place; they had personal characters to lose, their principles were publicly known, they were not dependent on the emoluments of office, nor thus had grown up through a succession of minor employments into places of distinction, the most ill-omened education for public men; they were not adventurers, they brought with them an accession of family influence, which raised them beyond the great temptation of new men—that of courting the populace; and as the natural result of their birth, connections, and intercourse with men of a high class of society, they acted under a higher sense of dignity, and their public acts were more generally marked with a fearless, open, and generous stamp.

On the other hand, the evils were of some moment in the monopoly of power in turning the State into a corporation, in the restriction on the rising ability of the humbler conditions of life, to the loss of doubtless much vigorous and original aid to the public councils, in the jealousy which that restriction naturally created in men who felt their talents, and in the consequent difficulties produced by the direction of those talents to party, as the only means of claiming justice for themselves. This was continually felt in the political tumults of England for the last fifty years of the century, and it was eminently experienced in Ireland, where every rising barrister instantly took the side of Opposition, and where even his attainment of office was felt as a stimulant and a bribe for new assaults on the Government: like buying off an invasion, the purchase was only a proclamation for a new march against the cabinet.

The Grenvilles were of the political caste, and for two-thirds of a century there was no political good fortune in which a Grenville was not sure to share, if on the ministerial side—nor measure of opposition in which a Grenville was not sure to be busy, until the change came round, and the bustling patriot was transformed into the complacent placeman.

The public origin of this family was derived from Richard Temple of Wotton, by his marriage with the sister of Lord Cobham of Stowe, whom she succeeded, by the title of Countess Temple, in 1759. The eldest son of this marriage was Richard, Earl Temple, born in 1711. The second son was George Grenville, the minister, born in 1712. The next brother was James Grenville, a Lord of Trade, Deputy-paymaster of the Forces, and Cofferer of the Household. The third was Henry Grenville, successively governor of Barbadoes, ambassador to Constantinople, and a Commissioner of Customs. The fourth was Thomas Grenville, a captain in the navy, who was unfortunately killed in action.

George Grenville, the minister, had three sons, equally heirs of official fortune;—George, who succeeded to the earldom of Temple, and afterwards obtained the marquisate of Buckingham; Thomas Grenville, who, after filling several lucrative offices, died lately, and honourably left his fine library to the nation. The youngest son was the late Lord Grenville, the coadjutor of William Pitt. The connection with that illustrious statesmen was formed through the marriage of Lady Hester Grenville, the sister of the first Earl Temple, with Pitt, afterwards Earl of Chatham, and the father of William Pitt. The present Duke of Buckingham is the great-grandson of George Grenville.

As George Grenville forms the principal personage of these volumes, a sketch of his progress to power may be given. Educated at Eton and Christ-Church, he was intended for the bar, but, at the suggestion of his relative, Lord Cobham, he soon determined on a political career. The borough of Buckingham was at his disposal, and he was its representative for thirty years. His rise through office was rapid. He was first made a Lord of the Admiralty, then a Lord of the Treasury, then Treasurer of the Navy, then Secretary of State, then First Lord of the Admiralty, until finally, in April 1763, he rose to be Premier, or First Lord of the Treasury, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. This consummation, however, was short-lived. Within two years he was deprived of the premiership, held office no more, and retired from public life for ever, leaving, as the principal memorial of his political career, the unlucky Stamp Act, so well known as the pretext for the revolt of America, the watchword of party in Parliament, and of faction in the streets, and yet a measure which no man could fairly charge with injustice, and whose consequences no man could charge upon the minister.

That Parliament had as valid a right to tax a British colony as it had to tax a British county, is beyond all doubt; and, remote as the question now is with respect to the American contest, we have other colonies which may be the wiser for stating its true grounds.

The British subject emigrating to a colony, however distant, is still a British subject; and the child of that emigrant born in the British colony is still a British subject. Allegiance cannot be extinguished by distance. If he takes arms against England, he is liable to be punished as a rebel. The support of the law, the support of the government, the support of the fleet and army, all which protect the empire, and with it the colony, must require contributions, and the colony, sharing in the protection, must be bound to assist that contribution—it must pay taxes. The outcry of the time, that the colonies were taxed without representation, was utterly unfounded. The colonies were represented in the British Parliament; they were represented by the whole Parliament legislating for the whole Empire. The wisdom of adding to the numbers of a parliament, already perhaps numerous enough for every purpose of deliberation, was a question exclusively for the Government, and the British colony in America had no want of advocates; the whole Opposition were its virtual representatives.

The question of right was thus decided. The question of policy was another consideration; and there can be no doubt that, by admitting American members into the House, the United States might have remained British for a few years longer. But distance and difficulty, population and power, would soon have solved the problem, and the great colony would have now been a great kingdom. The war made it a great republic. The bitterness of hostilities envenomed the colonies against the only form of government congenial to the British mind; and for a limited monarchy, the most fortunate and rational of all governments, they adopted a limited democracy, which nothing but the extent of their territories could have prevented, long since, from being an anarchy. But stubbornness on the one side, and faction on the other, prevailed. The Stamp Act was felt to be so legitimate, in the first instance, that it scarcely raised a debate in Parliament. The resistance revived the spirit of opposition in the legislature. It was too favourable an opportunity for metaphorical indignation and verbal virtue to be thrown away; and by the help of parliamentary intrigue, backed by popular outcry, this natural, obvious, and easy act of legislature was stigmatised as the foulest oppression. Time has rectified the opinion; and while we rejoice in the prosperity of all nations, we may calmly respect the principles of social law.

To George Grenville we owe the "Act for securing purity of Election," which was once regarded as a model of legislative wisdom, adequate to preserve the hustings from contamination and the House from influence for ever. But the dexterities of modern corruption have proved too subtle for the provisions of our ancestors. How many hundred elections have been driven through the Grenville Act, is not for us to say, and it would perhaps be difficult to calculate. But the constant lowering of the franchise has shown the weakness of all defences against a bribe; and as the expedient of every new candidate for popularity is to put the elections into hands lower still, we may safely predict the growing inefficiency of all laws against the temptation to corrupting of the populace.

The celebrated Burke, in his speech on American Taxation, a masterpiece of eloquence, and a masterpiece of that sophistry in which Party involved his illustrious spirit for the time, relieved the House from the dryness of statistics, by a striking sketch of Grenville, almost ten years after his retirement from public life, and nearly five years after he was in his tomb.

"Mr Grenville undoubtedly was a first-rate figure in the country. With a masculine understanding, and a stout and resolute heart, he had an application undissipated and unwearied. He took public business, not as a duty he was to fulfil, but as a pleasure he was to enjoy, and he seemed to have no delight out of the House, except in such things as in some way related to the business that was to be done within it. If he was ambitious, I will say this for him, his ambition was of a noble and generous strain. It was to raise himself, not by the low politics of a court, but to win his way to power through the laborious gradations of public service, and to secure himself a well-earned rank in Parliament, by a thorough knowledge of its constitution, and a perfect practice in all its business."

But this panegyric was rather lowered by its peroration. Burke was fond of looking at every subject in a variety of lights, and it became the habit of even his vigorous mind to fill up the background of his portraits with picturesque shade. He then closed his character of the deceased statesman by observing that his having been a barrister "narrowed the extent and freedom of his political views."

"He was bred to the law, a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding than all the other kinds of learning put together. But it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and liberalise the mind exactly in the same proportion." Having flung this passing sarcasm at the profession, he let fall a drop of contempt on the system of public employment.

"From that study, he did not go very largely into the world, but plunged into the business of office, and the limited and fixed forms established there. These forms are adapted to ordinary occasions, and therefore persons who are nurtured in office do admirably well so long as things go on in their common order; but when the highroads are broken up, and the waters are out, when a new and troubled scene is opened, and the file affords no precedent, then it is that a greater knowledge of mankind, and a far more extensive comprehension of things, is requisite than ever office gave, or than office ever can give. Mr Grenville thought better of the wisdom and power of human legislation than, in truth, it deserves."

The fact evidently is, that the fiery and soaring spirit of Burke despised the heavy uniformity and dull routine of the whole tribe of which Grenville was the representative; that he disdained the substitution of heavy regularity for brilliant enterprise, of precedent for principle, and of taking shelter under obsolete forms, instead of adopting those lofty innovations which alone can guide a government through new perils, deserve the name of statesmanship, and elevate politics into the dignity of a science.

But this attempt to qualify his panegyric, by laying the weight of Grenville's failure on his profession, was keenly retorted by Wedderburn, (then Solicitor-General, and afterwards Chancellor and Earl of Rosslyn,) declaring that he had no intention of taking a part in the debate, but that he had been called up by Burke's character of Grenville. He observed, "that the gentleman had neither done him that justice with which posterity might treat his memory, nor had he spoken of him as the general voice of a grateful people would even at that moment express itself of his person, his conduct, and his acts." After alluding to the remark, that his mind was narrowed by the bar, and that he had plunged into office before he mingled in the world, Wedderburn (who might have observed that he came into Parliament and politics at twenty-nine, consequently had practised but little in his profession, and that at thirty-three he held the office of a Lord of the Admiralty) said cleverly—

"Going into the world is a term too large for my narrow comprehension. If it means that he neither played, nor dressed, nor was a member of any of the fashionable clubs, I believe it may be true. But his birth and his talents introduced him to an early intimacy with the first men of the age. He passed, by regular gradations, from one office to another. Whatever related to the Marine of this country, he had learned during his attendance at the Admiralty. The Finance he had studied under a very able master at the Treasury. The Foreign Department was for a time intrusted to him. The proper business of the House was for several years his particular study. In almost every various office of the state he had acquired a practical knowledge, improved by theory; and, from the general course of his observation and researches, he had adopted principles and habits which the firm temper of his mind would not stoop to abandon or unlearn, in complaisance to the opinions of any man. Such were the disqualifications under which Mr Grenville was called forth to the first situation of administration, at a time when ancient prejudices were still respected, and before it was understood that parts were spoiled by application, that ignorance was preferable to knowledge, and that any lively man of imagination, without practice in office, and without experience, might start up at once, a self-taught minister, and undertake the management of a great country in difficult times."

We have given these extracts, as displaying both sides of the character, and by comparison enabling the student of history to form an estimate of a man who for twenty-one years had been exercised in the various administrations of the empire, and who finally rose to the highest official rank in the country.

But it is still more to the advantage of his character, and it may have constituted the chief secret of his success, that he was a man of integrity; that the corruptions universally charged upon Walpole were never fixed on him; that, in an age when the highest rank in the realm often startled the nation, by following foreign fashions of morality, he was a good father, a faithful husband, and a firm friend.

One of the observations which these volumes force upon us, is the agreeable evidence of the improvement in the public health. Every man in high station seems to have been the victim of a perpetual tendency to disease. Ministers seem universally to have been tortured by gout, or some painful disorder, which drove them to the country, the Continent, or the Bath waters. The women of rank had some unaccountable and indescribable malady of their own, which they called the Vapours; every judge had some excruciating disorder, which he could alleviate only by opium; every man of letters had some ailment of the same kind. The common people, living in the unventilated and obscure haunts of cities, had, of course, all the diseases which we are now so slowly striving to prevent; and the ploughman appeared to enjoy the only health in the land. How far the improvement in this all-important matter may be owing to improved medical science, to the drainage of the soil, to more extended agriculture, or to some fortunate change in the atmosphere, or even to the adoption of more temperate habits, and the substitution of lighter food, we cannot precisely say; but there can be scarcely a doubt of the change in the general state of health, in the duration of life, in the proportion of those who grow up to maturity to those who die in infancy, and even in the continued vigour of the frame and faculties to a more advanced age.

The first letter in the correspondence is from Lord Cornbury, recommending Mr Grenville to travel for his recovery from a sickness which apparently enfeebled all his earlier years. His lordship suggests the south of France as a supplement to Bath, where he had gone to drink the waters, then a panacea for the distempers of high life, and where his residence is mentioned in a lively epistle from Lyttleton to Pope. "George Grenville is in a fair way of recovery; the waters agree with him. Cheyne (the physician) says he is a giant, a son of Anak, made like Gilbert, the Lord Bishop of Sarum, and may, therefore, if he pleases, live for ever; his present sickness being nothing but a fillip given for his good, to make him temperate, and put him under the care of Dr Cheyne."

Lord Cornbury was an amiable young man, given to hospitality and letter-writing, and panegyrised by Pope in such tributes as his pretended scorn for nobility did not prevent him from paying to his entertainers:—

"Would you be blest, despise low joys, low gains,
Disdain whatever Cornbury disdains;
Be virtuous, and be happy, for your pains."

Such are the honours and the advice of poetry; but it may be suggested that a British peer has little temptation to low joys or low gains, and that it is not difficult to bear the trials of life in possession of every advantage which life can give. The pungent pen of Lady Wortley Montague gives an easier account of this dilettante lord on his death. "He had certainly a very good heart: I have often thought it a great pity it was not under the direction of a better head. His desire of fixing his name to a certain quantity of wall, is one instance, among thousands, of the passion men have for perpetuating their memory"—(possibly an allusion, sufficiently contemptuous, to his having built at Cornbury Park in Oxfordshire.)

We next have a letter from the first Lord Lyttleton, on the subject of a tour which the minister was still making, recommending that he should not risk his final recovery by coming to the House of Commons,—"Not that, if you were present, either you or I could do any good."

Lord Hervey, in his Memoirs of the Reign of George II., gives a sketch of Lyttleton, such as a modern fop might give of a successful rival, closing with—"He had a great flow of words, that were always uttered in a lulling monotony; and the little meaning they had to boast of was generally borrowed from the commonplace maxims and sentiments of moralists, philosophers, patriots, and poets, crudely imbibed, half-digested, ill put together, and confusedly refunded."

Such was the caricature of the Lyttleton with whose poems all the ladies of England were enamoured, and who won all the plaudits of the clergy by his "Tract on the Conversion of St Paul;" certainly a very clever performance, and an extraordinary one, as coming from a man living in the fashionable circles of the last century.

Then follows a letter from the celebrated Lord Mansfield on the same subject:—

"I am very impatient for your recovery, and I rejoice in the favourable accounts I hear. I rambled about, as usual, during the leisure hours I had; and, among other places I was at, I spent three days most agreeably at Hagley with our friends Lyttleton and Pitt; where, you may believe, you was—[sic, in orig.]—not forgot.... Pope is at Bath, perched upon his hill, making epigrams, and stifling them in their birth; and Lord H., [Hervey]—would you believe it!—is writing libels on the king and his ministers."

Lord Hervey was the son of the first Earl of Bristol—was the most inveterate courtier of his time, and in remarkable confidence with the whole of the royal family. Unfortunately, he knew too much, and has bequeathed his knowledge to posterity in a Memoir, fatal to the moral character of his age, yet lively, epigrammatic, and anecdotical. The whole family, even to the close of the century, were eccentric. The keen and witty Lady Wortley Montague defined them as a third class of the human race—"men, women, and Herveys."

Those were curious times. The letter ends with the news that Lord Bradford's mistress, to whom he had left his estate, had bequeathed it to Pulteney, Earl of Bath. Thus that most parsimonious of all peers got £12,000 a-year!

A letter from Richard Grenville (Lord Temple) to his brother, when abroad, thus gives him the political news of the day:—

"Lord Cobham and Lord Gower have refused going into the cabinet, and we have had very warm work in the House of Commons, the first day, upon the Address. Pitt (Earl of Chatham) spoke like ten thousand angels! and your humble servant was so inflamed at their indecency, that he could not contain, but talked a good while with his usual modesty.... We divided 150 against 259; we reckon ourselves, however, 200. And it is inconceivable how colloquing and flattering all the ministers are to all of us, notwithstanding our impertinence.... Who but young Bathurst to answer me, in the most ridiculous, indecent, stupid speech that ever was made. It was melancholy, but entertaining enough, to see them skulk in, with their tails betwixt their legs, like so many spaniels.... We shall have a glorious day about the sixteen thousand. We shall then see, also, who are Hanoverians and who Englishmen."

The day of the sixteen thousand was the debate on fixing the subsidy for the payment of that number of Hanoverian troops. On this point Opposition made a great and popular stand, contending, truly enough, that nothing could be more derogatory to the honour of a great country than the employment of mercenaries; but George II. had all the prejudices of a German Elector on the subject, and the motion was urged and carried.

The first two Georges seemed actually to think that the English throne depended on the Hanoverian, and that the security of England itself was imperfect without a few German brigades. The third George, however, was of a different opinion; he boasted of his "being born a Briton;" and in that manly and rational feeling, he found England able to defend herself.

The Bathurst mentioned in the letter was the son of the lively and pleasant old Lord Bathurst, the associate of Pope and the wits of his day, alluded to in Burke's fine Episode of American Progress. This son became Lord Chancellor. There is an allusion to Bubb Dodington in the letter referring to his marriage. He led a loose life; and in this instance Horace Walpole gave him but little credit for reformation:—"Mr Dodington has at last owned his match with his old mistress. I suppose he wants a new one."

Dodington (Lord Melcombe) deserves some recollection for the mere sake of his political flexibility. He entered Parliament young, and was shortly after sent Envoy to Spain. Inheriting a considerable fortune from his father, whose name was Bubb, he acquired a large estate by the death of his maternal uncle, Dodington, whose name he took in consequence. Still the pursuit of place was the business of his life, and he became proverbial for the eagerness of his avarice, and the slipperiness of his principles. Some talent, some plausibility, great perseverance, and unblushing impudence, gained him a succession of employments under all the successive parties. Beginning his political life under Walpole, by whom he was appointed a Lord of the Treasury, he secured for himself the lucrative sinecure of the Clerkship of the Pells in Ireland. When Walpole began to totter, Dodington ratted; and when the minister finally fell, he was made a sharer in the spoil, obtaining the Treasurership of the Navy. When Frederick, Prince of Wales, started in opposition, Dodington hastened to worship the rising sun, and became head of the "Prince's party." When Frederick died, Dodington returned to his old quarters, and figured again as Treasurer of the Navy, under the Newcastle administration.

On the death of George II., Lord Bute was the new dispenser of places, and Dodington joined him accordingly. His reward was the peerage in the same year. This was the summit of his busy, arrogant, aspiring, and humiliating career. Whether he contemplated further experiments on fortune is not now to be known, for he enjoyed his honours but a twelvemonth, dying in 1762. All this labour of servility was for himself alone, for he had no offspring. His Diary is familiar to the readers of political biography, and it is uniformly quoted as the most singular instance, in public life, of fearless exposure to contempt, of sinister caution, and conscious tergiversation.

A bon mot of Chesterfield was long remembered. Dodington, on going abroad on some mission, observed to Chesterfield the vexation of having such a name as Bubb appended to his better-sounding appellation. "Poh!" said Chesterfield, "enlarge it—call yourself Silly-bubb."

In this correspondence, it is surprising that we meet so few references to the invasion of the Pretender in 1745, unless we are to account for it by the letters having been destroyed. The event itself was the most memorable since the Civil War; and if the nation had been less Protestant, it might have changed the dynasty. But the bigotry of James II. had raised a spirit of determined resistance to his line, which nothing but actual overthrow in the field could extinguish. The enterprise was gallantly conceived, and as gallantly executed by the Highlanders; but there was a want of force. The Clans fought boldly, but their blood was shed in vain; and the invasion actually gave additional strength to the Protestant throne.

One of George Grenville's letters adverts to the progress of events briefly in these words:—

"The last accounts from the North say that the Highlanders have begun plundering part of the country between Edinburgh and Berwick. This manner of proceeding may be an unfortunate one with respect to those on whom it falls; but cannot be more so to them than to the party which suffers it, whose hopes, I think, it must entirely destroy, if carried to any length. It is now said that the Castle of Edinburgh is in great want of provisions; that the governor of the Castle ordered the inhabitants of the city to supply him, and threatened, in case of refusal, to burn the town, and beat it down about their ears. They obeyed for two or three days; but then the Highlanders threatened them with military execution if they continued it any longer; upon which they desisted immediately: and the magistrates have applied to the King, stating their miserable situation, and beseeching him to give orders to the governor not to execute his threats. The answer to the application I do not know; but I imagine it is a favourable one."

An amusing feature of these volumes is the style in which public men, in the last age, spoke of each other. It was contemptuous in the extreme—every character was a caricature. Pitt, in a letter to George Grenville, had alluded to Sir William Yonge, a veteran placeman, as telling him of Grenville's "being very well; and I most sincerely hope he tells me truth. I could more easily pardon any of the fictions in which he sometimes deals, than one on this occasion."

Lord Hervey, in his Memoirs, thus sketches Yonge:—

"Without having done anything that I know of remarkably profligate, anything out of the common track of a ductile courtier and a parliamentary tool, his name was proverbially used to express everything pitiful, corrupt, and contemptible. It is true, he was a great liar, but rather a mean than a vicious one. He had been always constant to the same party, he was good-natured and good-humoured, never offensive in company, nobody's friend, nobody's enemy.... He had a great command of what is called parliamentary language, and a talent of talking eloquently without a meaning, and expatiating agreeably upon nothing, beyond any man, I believe, that ever had the gift of speech."

After all, this description leaves Yonge, as regards talents, a very considerable man. His lying, however, blackens the whole character. Yet it throve with him; for he was, in succession, Commissioner of the Admiralty, and of the Treasury, Secretary-at-War, finishing all by the opulent sinecure of joint-Treasurer of Ireland.

All the Memoirs of the time remind us of the adage of Solomon, "There is nothing new under the sun." Who will not recognise, in the character of Admiral Vernon, (which has had the honour to be delineated by Lord John Russell,) something of a celebrated living Admiral?

"Vernon was a man of undoubted talent, but ill qualified, by his character, to govern those under him, or to obey those above him. Vernon was raised to the rank of Admiral of the White, in April 1745. He was immediately appointed to the command of the fleet, for the defence of the Channel and north coast, and in this situation his vigilance has been greatly commended. The Board of Admiralty, however, having found fault with some of his dispositions of the force, he complained bitterly, and, after an angry correspondence, desired leave to strike his flag. The Admiralty, finding it useless to give orders, which were always cavilled at, complied with his request. Hereupon, the Admiral, who seems to have thought that the public would support him against the Government, published two pamphlets, in which he revealed the orders he had received, and published, without leave, his official correspondence. The Admiralty visited this offence in the most severe manner. Admiral Vernon was called on to attend the Board. When he appeared, the Duke of Bedford asked him, if he was the publisher of the two pamphlets. He declined to answer the question. The Duke of Bedford then informed him that the Board, after such a refusal, could not but consider him as the publisher. He stated his surprise that he should have been asked such a question, and withdrew. The next day, the Duke of Bedford saw the King, and signified to the Board the King's pleasure that Vice-Admiral Vernon should be struck out of the list of flag-officers."

A letter from Pitt speaks of his election, and the unlucky battle of Lauffeldt, in the same breath.

"My dear Grenville,—I am this moment arrived from Sussex, victorious as yourself, (Grenville had just been elected for Bridport,) after being opposed by Mr Gage and the Earl of Middlesex. It is certain my own success does not give me more pleasure than yours does.... Would to God our victories were not confined to our own little world. A full detail of the late action I have not yet seen. The clearest and best makes it evident that the British and Electoral troops did all that can be expected from men overpowered by numbers, the whole weight being upon them. The Duke (of Cumberland) has done himself great honour, by the efforts he made in person during the action," &c. &c.

William Duke of Cumberland was always unfortunate on the Continent, and, we believe, never succeeded but at Culloden. In the battle of Lauffeldt, Walpole says, "he was very near taken, having, through his short sight, mistaken a body of French for his own people. He behaved as bravely as usual; but (he adds sarcastically) his prowess is so well established, that it grows time for him to exert other qualities of a general."

In this action, considerable loss seems to have taken place among the officers of rank. Walpole says of Conway—"Harry Conway, whom nature always designed for a hero of romance, and who is deplace life, did wonders, but was overpowered and flung down, when one French hussar held him by the hair, while another was going to stab him. At the instant, an English sergeant, with a soldier, came up and killed the latter, but was instantly killed himself. The soldier attacked the other, and Mr Conway escaped, but was afterwards taken prisoner, and is since released on parole."

The description of the Lord Middlesex, mentioned in the letter, has all the keenness of Walpole's style. (He was the eldest son of the Duke of Dorset, and Master of the Horse to the Prince of Wales.) "His figure was handsome, had all the reserve of his family, and all the dignity of his ancestors. His passion was the direction of operas, in which he had not only wasted immense sums, but had stood lawsuits in Westminster Hall with some of those poor devils for their salaries. The Duke of Dorset had often paid his debts, but never could work upon his affections; and he had at last carried his disobedience so far, in complaisance to, and in imitation of the Prince, as to oppose his father in his own boroughs."

The death of Pelham, in 1754, awoke the bustle of parties in a singular degree. The activity of Fox (Lord Holland) was remarked by every one. Pelham had died about six in the morning; Fox was at Lord Hartington's door before eight, called on Pitt at an "early hour;" and a letter from Lord Hardwicke says—"A certain person (Fox) within a few hours after Mr Pelham's death, had made strong advances to the Duke of Newcastle and myself." Pitt's letter, addressed to Lyttleton and the Grenvilles, containing the proposal for a new cabinet, thus speaks of Fox:—"As to the nomination of a Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Fox, in point of party, seniority in the corps, and, I think, of ability for Treasury and House of Commons business, stands, upon the whole, first of any. Dr Lee, if his health permits, would be very desirable. You, my dear Grenville, would be my nomination. A fourth idea, which, if practicable, might have great strength and efficiency for Government in it—I mean to secularise, if I may use the expression, the Solicitor-General (Murray,) and make him Chancellor of the Exchequer."

This fabric of the ministerial brain vanished, and Pitt remained in the subordinate position of Paymaster of the Forces. The ostensible cause was, the King's disinclination to have any intercourse with Pitt. That disinclination, however, ceased to be a pretext when Pitt became necessary to the Crown.

The fluctuations of memorable minds are the most interesting part of their history. Pitt's political disappointments always brought on a fit of his philosophy. When fortune smiled again, he forgot the philosophy, and grasped at the political prize. After the failure of his plan for the cabinet, he flew to Bath, and there, between disgust and distemper, he became romantic.

He thus writes to Earl Temple:—

"I am still the same indolent, inactive thing your lordship saw me; insomuch that I can hear unmoved of Parliament's assembling, and Speakers choosing, and all other great earthly things. I live the vernal day on verdant hills or sequestered valleys, where, to be poetical, for me health gushes from a thousand springs; and I enjoy the return of her, and the absence of that thing called Ambition, with no small philosophic delight. In a word, I envy not the favourites of Heaven, the few, the very few, 'quos æquus amavit Jupiter;' the dust of Kensington causey, or the verdure of Lincoln's-Inn-Fields." (The King resided at Kensington, and the Duke of Newcastle in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields.) "I shall despatch my necessary business as fast as I can, and pursue you to Stowe, where the charms, so seldom found, of true taste, and the more rare joys and comforts of true friendship, have fixed their happy residence. There it is that I most impatiently long to enjoy you and your works."

Wilkes now comes on the tapis. A letter from Earl Temple congratulates him on having returned from the "expensive delights of Berwick." "I hope this will find you in good health, spirits as usual, and with an excellent cause. It is very gracious and kind in the pious Æneas, after his conversion after the love-feast, to keep up that kind of friendship with one who has so slender a claim to be admitted to the table of the saints."

The letter is written in a strain fitter for Wilkes than for a man in a public rank, and with a public character. The "expensive delights of Berwick" was an allusion to Wilkes's contest for the borough, which cost him between three and four thousand pounds, and in which he was defeated after all by the Delaval interest. Fox's description of the debate on the petition is pungent. "Mr Wilkes, a friend, it seems, of Pitt, (so little was he publicly known at this period,) petitioned against the younger Delaval, chose (chosen) at Berwick, on the ground of bribery only. Delaval made a speech, on his being thus attacked, full of wit, humour, and buffoonery, which kept the House in a continued roar of laughter."

From this period, for forty years, Wilkes flourished before the public. The man will do a striking service to the history of the constitution, of popular passion, and of political character, who shall write a "History of Wilkes." There have been memoirs of his life, publications of his letters, and registers of his political victories; but these are still but Mémoires pour Servir. The history of the partisan is yet to be written; and it will still be the more curious, since it will be the history of a political age, which could have existed in no other country. Wilkes was embodied Demagogism. Athens might have her Cleon, Naples her Massaniello, and modern Rome her Rienzi; but England alone could produce a Wilkes, tolerate him, triumph in him, struggle for him, and finally pay to his indolent, helpless, and exhausted old age, almost the same popular veneration which the multitude had paid when his intrigues convulsed the whole fabric of the state. A temperament daring, crafty, and unscrupulous, a fluent pen, and a sarcastic wit, were the instruments of an ambition as remorseless, worldly, and grasping, as dwelt in the bosom of a Cæsar Borgia or a Catiline.

An outline of this singular man's bustling career will best show the pertinacity, the trials, and the troubles which belonged to the candidate for the Tribuneship of Great Britain.

John Wilkes, born in 1727, the son of a rich distiller, began his public life in the canvass for Berwick—alluded to by Lord Temple's letter. Having lost that election, he obtained a seat for Aylesbury, which involved him in heavy expenses. Parliament now became his resource and his profession; and he connected himself with Lord Temple, who gave him the colonelcy of the Buckingham militia.

In 1762, on the retirement of Lord Temple and Pitt from the ministry, he became an Opposition pamphleteer. Lord Bute, though a man of ability, was unpopular, as the royal favourite, and Wilkes attacked him in the North Briton. In 1763, Lord Bute resigned, and Wilkes, in the memorable No. 45 of the North Briton, libelled the King's speech. The sarcasm stung so deep that a prosecution was ordered against him. The prosecution finally became a triumph. The Home Secretary having issued a "General Warrant" for the apprehension of the author, printers, and publishers of the libel, Wilkes, on his arrest, denied its legality, and, as a member of Parliament, was committed to the Tower. The attention of the country was now fixed on the question. He was brought up before Chief Baron Pratt, who decided on the illegality of general warrants, and he was discharged amid the popular acclamations. Wilkes, in his turn, brought actions against the Home Secretary, the under secretaries, the messengers, &c., and gained them all, with damages—the Crown paying the damages. He was now the declared champion of the populace.

He republished the libel—fought a duel on the subject—was severely wounded—and fled to France. A second prosecution was commenced, and, on his non-appearance, he was expelled from the House of Commons. A third prosecution was commenced against him for language in a publication which was pronounced flagitious; and not returning to meet it, he was outlawed.

On the change of ministry he returned to England, and was imprisoned; and yet, during his imprisonment, was elected for Middlesex. He was tried, and condemned to remain in jail twenty-two months, or be fined £1000.

In 1769, in consequence of a pamphlet censuring the ministry for the employment of troops to suppress the riots at his election, he was again expelled, and again elected.

He was now declared incapable of sitting in Parliament, and Colonel Luttrel was returned as the sitting member, though with but a fourth of the votes. This act roused the popular indignation once more.

Wilkes, driven from Parliament, now turned to the city, and was elected alderman; and on some printers being brought before him, apprehended by a Royal proclamation, he discharged them all, on the ground of maintaining the privileges of the city. The Lord Mayor, Oliver, and Crosby, an alderman, followed Wilkes's example, and being members of the House, were sent to the Tower. Wilkes, on being ordered to attend at the bar, claimed his seat. Ministers now dreading further involvement, adjourned the House over the day appointed for his attendance, and, in 1774, he took his seat in triumph as member for Middlesex!

But his fortune was now decayed; old age was coming on, and he was glad to be chosen Chamberlain for London, (with a salary of nearly £4000 a-year.) On the fall of the North Cabinet, 1782, he moved that the resolution against him on the Journals should be expunged. The motion was carried; his victory was complete, and the remainder of his life was opulent and calm. That remainder, however, was brief, for he died in 1797, at the age of seventy.

Wilkes was a man of education, a man of wit, and a man of intrepidity. But his education had begun under an English sectary, and was finished in a foreign college—the first accounting for his republicanism, the next for his dissoluteness. But, though the man himself was worthless, his struggles were not unprofitable to the country. They fixed the popular attention on the principles of national liberty; they brought all the great constitutional questions into perpetual study. They rendered the public mind so sensitive to the possible encroachments of the Crown, or even of the Commons, that the future tyranny of any branch of the Legislature would be next to impossible. Let the merit of Wilkes be, that he drew a fence round the Constitution.

But Wilkes had a support unknown to the public of his time, yet amply divulged in these volumes. He appears to have kept up a constant correspondence with Earl Temple, the head of the Grenville interest; to have been anxious for his opinion on his publications, and to have depended on him, even for pecuniary resources, which probably were applied to those publications. The connection of Wilkes in public sentiment with the Grenvilles, was, of course, well known; but we doubt if the evidence of an intimate agency was understood before. In these letters, Wilkes twice draws on Lord Temple for £500; and as his lordship was opulent, and his client quite the reverse, it is likely that those calls were not the only instances of craving. But this connection largely accounts for the otherwise marvellous daring of Wilkes. He had the Grenvilles, Pitt, and their whole connection, then a most powerful party, to fall back upon. The Cabinet which sent him to prison one day, might be succeeded by the Cabinet which would open his gates the next; his patrons might be the possessors of all power, and in the mean time, however he might be persecuted, he was sure not to be crushed.

We have a letter from Lord Temple on this subject, which shows, by its wish to mislead suspicion, the nature of this intimacy. The letter is from a corrected and much obliterated draught, in Lord Temple's handwriting; and as the editor says, "The very guarded manner in which the letter is expressed, renders it probable that Lord Temple expected that it would be read in the Post Office before it reached its destination; for it cannot be supposed that he was ignorant of the connection between the North Briton and Wilkes. Almon (the printer) says, "Lord Temple was not ignorant of his friend's design, and certainly approved of it."

The letter thus begins—"As to public events, I am sorry to see that the paper hostilities are renewed with so high a degree of acrimony as now appears on all sides; and although I make it a rule not to agitate any matter of a political nature by the Post—this Argus, with, at least, a hundred eyes—yet, while my thoughts agree with Government, I may venture to hazard them, subject even to that inspection. I am quite at loss to guess through what channel the North Briton flows." The remainder is a critique on the paper, concluding, "as the N. B. will, I suppose, endeavour by every means to lie concealed, it will be impossible to ferret him out, and give him good advice, otherwise I am sure I could convince him."

The caution of this note shows at once the confidential nature of the connection, and the consciousness of the responsibility. But the subsequent letters of Lord Temple to Wilkes prove the continued and increased interest taken by his lordship in Wilkes's political productions. A paper, called the Monitor, whether edited by Wilkes or not, but evidently conceived by Lord Temple to be under his direction, having expressed strong opinions relative to the royal personages, his lordship writes as follows:—

"As all the sins of the Monitor against the ruling powers are principally charged upon our friend B., [Bradmore, his attorney,] and then, by way of rebound, upon two other persons, to whom the Monitor has been so kindly partial, it is of the more moment to avoid that sort of personality which regards any of the R. F., [royal family.] I am glad, therefore, my hint came, at least, time enough to prevent the publication of what would have filled up the whole measure of offence.... As to other matters, sportsmen, I suppose, are at liberty to pursue lawful game. I am only solicitous to have them not trespassers within the bounds of royal manors.... I hope I may be allowed to defray the loss and the expense of laying aside the paper you sent me."

This evidently implies that the paper was submitted to his lordship before publication.

The intercourse of a man like Wilkes, a notorious profligate, and impeached in public for his excess of profligacy, could not have been suffered by a man alive to character, but for some motive beyond the public eye; it was, of course, political, the common pursuit of an object, which is presumed to salve all sins.

A strong instance of their intimacy occurs in what Wilkes might have considered as his last act in this world. Lord Talbot, having been attacked in the North Briton, demanded an apology from Wilkes, who denied his lordship's right to question him. A challenge ensued, which produced a meeting, which produced an exchange of shots, without injury on either side. But Wilkes had given to his second, Colonel Berkeley, a note to be delivered, in case of his fall, to Earl Temple. This note Berkeley desired to return to Wilkes on the close of the affair; but it was forwarded to Temple, "as a proof of the regard and affection he bore your lordship, at a minute which might have been his last."

Wilkes's letter is dated

"Bagshot, Nov. 5—Seven at night.

"My Lord,—I am here, just going to decide a point of honour with Lord Talbot. I have only to thank your lordship for all your favours to me; and to entreat you to desire Lady Temple to superintend the education of a daughter, whom I love beyond all the world. I am, my Lord, your obliged and affectionate humble servant,

John Wilkes."

The second volume contains the Correspondence of Ministers, actual and expectant, down to 1764. Among those letters is one which exhibits a curious coincidence with the late transactions of the Foreign Office, though the relative positions of the persons were changed.

"The Earl of Egremont to Mr Grenville.

February 12, 1763.

"Dear Sir,—Perhaps the Duc de Nivernois has sent you word that the Treaty was to be signed yesterday. If not, I would not leave you a moment ignorant of the news after I had had it. Ever yours most faithfully,

Egremont."

"What think you of the Duke of B., [Bedford, then ambassador in Paris,] who lets the King's Ministers be informed by the French ambassador of the appointment to sign the Treaty!"

The volume abounds in references to high names. Among the rest we have a "Note" from the great Samuel Johnson, which, though only a receipt for his pension, has the value of a national remembrancer:—"To Mr Grenville. Sir,—Be pleased to pay to the bearer seventy-five pounds, being the quarterly payment of a pension granted by his Majesty, and due on the 29th of June last to, Sir, your humble servant, Sam. Johnson." The merit of this pension, so worthily bestowed, was due to Wedderburn, afterwards Earl of Rosslyn, and Chancellor.

A letter from the Countess Temple contains some lively Court gossip.

"Mrs Ryde was here yesterday. She is acquainted with a brother of one of the yeomen of the guard. He tells her, that the King cannot live without my Lord Bute. If he goes out anywhere, he stops, when he comes back, to ask if my Lord Bute is come yet. And that his lords, or people that are about him, look as mad as can be at it."

"The mob have a good story of the Duke of Devonshire, (Lord Chamberlain.) That he went first, to light the King; and the King followed him, leaning on Lord Bute's shoulder; upon which the Duke of Devonshire turned about, and desired to know 'whom he was waiting upon?'"

The name of the Chevalier D'Eon occurs in the Correspondence as demanding some wine detained in the Customs. The Chevalier was a personage who excited great public curiosity, even almost within our own time. He had been a captain of French dragoons, and was brought to England as the secretary to the Duc de Nivernois, who conducted the negotiations for the peace of 1763. On the Duke's departure, he left D'Eon minister-plenipotentiary. The Count de Guerchy, the new ambassador, desired him to resume the post of secretary; this hurt his pride, and he quarrelled with the ambassador and with the English Court, but was pensioned by France. A report at length was spread that D'Eon was actually a female; this the Chevalier fiercely denied, and we believe threatened to shoot the authors of the report. However, in a short time after, he adopted the dress of a female, and retained it till he died. As all matters in England then turned to gambling, wagers were laid on the subject; until, at length, it was proved that the assumption of the female dress was either an eccentricity or a wilful imposture. His pension having been cut off by the Revolution, this singular person was reduced to great difficulties; so much so, that, to raise money, he appeared as a fencer on the stage, but still appeared in woman's costume.

We must now close our observations on this collection, which is indispensable to the historian of the time. Not referring to any of those great transactions which make the characteristics, or the catastrophes, of nations, these letters exhibit the interior of public life with remarkable minuteness, and must have a peculiar interest for public men. But, with the honours of the statesman, they lay before us so vivid an example of the troubles, the vexations, and the disappointments of political life, and the struggles of men possessing the highest abilities and the highest character, that we doubt whether a more stringent moral against political ambition ever came before the eyes of England.

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[TIBET AND THE LAMAS.][7]

Some years ago we had taken our passage for Alexandria on board a packet from Valletta. The Ægyptus, spick and span new from the Toulon dockyard, with the tricolor flaunting over her stern all resplendent with gilded sphynxes, lay, steam up and ready for departure, near the centre of the Great Harbour, amid that glorious cluster of cities which the knights of St John reared round the banner of the Cross, when Christendom was forced to shorten her cords and draw in her outposts before the swelling power of the unbelievers. Berth selected, baggage stowed away, and hour of dinner ascertained, we were at leisure to enjoy the familiar but never palling glories of the sky and scenery, and to amuse ourselves in watching the travellers of various nations who, party by party, mounted the deck, speculating the while on whatever promised in the first aspect of those who were to be our messmates on the five days' voyage. They were not numerous or very interesting—a party of French artists, bloused and bearded, who returned from their brief circuit of Valletta as full of the stalwart figures and novel costume of its garrison (the Forty-Second) as of the picturesque grandeur of its palaces, or the Titanic sublimity of its bulwarks—a grey-haired English veteran proceeding to his divisional command in India, with wife and daughters, and a most ante-Napierian baggage-train, received by M. le Commandant with scowling courtesy, as if the stately dame were perfide Albion in proper person—then one or two half-Frenchified Moslems, returning from their studies in Paris with a complement of Western vice and science—and lastly, in coarse brown robe, sandalled feet, and shaven crown, with shining breviary beneath the arm, three Capuchin monks, going forth to make disciples for Holy Church in the far East. Each of the latter had his trunk—one of those lanky, hog-backed articles in which the continental European rejoices—and on the trunk his name and destination painted. Two, if we remember, were bound for Agra—the destination of the third we never can forget. On his coffer the painter had inscribed, as coolly, we daresay, as a railway porter would ticket your portmanteau for York or Glasgow,

"Fr. Anastasio
Tibet."

"It is a far cry to Loch Ow;" and whether brother Anastasius and his long pack ever reached their destination as per ticket we know not. But Tibet and its capital have since been visited by two brethren of his Church, though not of his order; and we have to thank Mr Prinsep for calling attention to their narrative in the very able abstract which he has published.[8]

To many readers, possibly, the name of Tibet calls up but a vague and shadowy image of a sort of eastern Lapland, which serves as a top-margin to the map of Hindostan, and produces lamas, generally understood to be a species of shawl goats from whose fleece the Messrs Nicol make world-renowned paletôts. Our purpose, then, is to define our ideas of the region called Tibet, and to gather together as we may, from old and new sources, some picture more or less dim and fragmentary of the land and its inhabitants.

Conquerors and congresses may make rivers the frontiers of polities and zollvereins, but mountains are the true boundaries of races.[9] The Rhine may part Germany from France, but the Vosges, not the Rhine, parts the German from the Frenchman. Not Tweed, but the Grampians, have marked in our native land the marches of Celt and Saxon. On the side of the Five Rivers the Indian population shades gradually from the true Hindoo into the shaggy robber of the valleys west of the Indus; at the extremity of the peninsula the Tamul tribes of the continent have peopled the coast of Ceylon, as the ancient Belgæ peopled the coast of Kent. But along the northern limit of India runs a barrier which,

"With snowy ridge the roving Tartar bounds,"

dividing the Caucasian from the Mongolian race now as completely as it did two or three thousand years ago.

From the plains of the Punjab, hard baked beneath the blazing May sun—from the dusty levels of Sirhind, where meagre acacias cheat the eye with promise of shade—from the long lines of thatched pyramids that greet the traveller in the Doab, as he approaches a British cantonment—eastward through the rich misgoverned tracts of populous Oude, that year by year pour forth their streams of stalwart soldiers, servants, and labourers, to push their fortune in the service of the Kumpanee Buhadoor or its representatives—still eastward from the fertile prairies of Tirhoot and Purneea—from the bamboo thickets and rice swamps of northern Bengal—yet far eastward from the ultima Thule of Anglo-Indian power, where the majestic flood of Burrampooter sweeps down into Assam from the unknown hills—from all these

"Dusk faces with white muslin turbans wreathed"

look northward through the clear morning air on the same mighty Himalaya,[10] stretching beyond their ken its awful barrier of unchanging snow.

In mounting from the plains of India over the arduous passes, ranging from 12,000 to 20,000 feet above the sea, through which the pressure of human need, curiosity, and superstition, has forced a scanty and intermittent stream of intercourse, the traveller, after traversing the last ridge of the Himalaya, instead of having to descend again to the level of the southern regions, finds himself but little raised above a vast table-land, in some places extending in barren wastes of plain, or of bare monotonous hills, intersected by sudden deep valleys or great ravines, in which the rivers flow and the few villages are scattered; in others forming an endless alternation of lofty mountain ranges and low valleys, but the bottom of these last still many thousand feet above the plains of the Indian peninsula. To this elevated region, stretching from the Indus north-west of Kashmeer, to the extremest point of Assam, and somewhat farther east, a space of more than 1500 miles, the name of Tibet applies. The limits of its extent northward are somewhat more vague; but if they be considered to include a breadth of three or four degrees of latitude (33°-36°) towards the western extremity, and of nine or ten degrees (28°-38°) in the eastern and widest part, the estimate will not be far wrong. The identity throughout this "very large and long countrey," (to borrow the expression of an old traveller,) consists in the general use of the same language and customs, the prevalence, except in the extreme west, of the same faith, and the possession of the same religious books, written or printed in a character common to all. To these we might perhaps add the domestication of the shawl-goat and the yak throughout the whole territory.

The name of Tibet does not appear to be known, or at least applied, either in the country itself or by its Hindoo neighbours. Tubbet, or Tobot, is stated to have been the Mongolian appellation of a nation who anciently occupied the mountainous country on the north-west confines of China. Our old travellers doubtless learned the word from the Mongols; and from them also it has been adopted as the name of the high country north of India, in all the Mussulman languages of Western Asia. It was more particularly, perhaps, applied in these to Balti and Ladakh, the two most westerly districts, which, in the time of Bernier, were commonly distinguished as Little and Great Tibet. The natives apply to their country the name of Bód or Pót, and as Bhoteeas they are themselves known in Hindostan; though the appellation of Bhotan has in our geography-books come to be confined to a small dependency of Tibet bordering on the north of Assam, where the race comes most closely in contact with our knowledge and the British power, just as our forefathers gave the title of Dutch specially to that fraction of the Teutonic or Deutsch race which most nearly adjoined their shores.

The central and most elevated portion of this region is the province of Ngari—called by the people of the adjoining British territory Hyundes, or "Snowland." It embraces extensive desert tracts, intersected by several lofty ranges, the chief being that of Kylass, the sacred celestial mountain of Indian mythology. The table-land at the foot of Kylass, on which lie the twin lakes of Rákas Thal and Manasaráwur, at a height of 15,250 feet above the sea, is probably the most elevated in Asia, or in the world. On the shores of these sacred lakes occurred, some years ago, the catastrophe of a curious historical episode. Zorawur Singh, commanding the troops, of Goolab Singh of Jummoo, (now well known as the Lord of Kashmeer,) after overrunning Little Tibet and subjugating Ladakh, advanced up the Indus and beyond it, till he had occupied posts on the frontier of the Nepalese Himalayas, as if he meditated a foray on the Grand Lama's capital at last. But it proved a Moscow expedition on a small scale. His troops, unused to such a climate, and straitened for fuel, were beset in the depth of winter by a superior force from Lhassa, and, helpless from cold, were overpowered: their leader was slain, their officers captured, and the mass perished in heaps miserably. A few poor, frost-maimed wretches—the sole relics of Zorawur Singh's adventurous band—brought the tale to the British station at Almora, having fled across passes 16,000 feet high in mid-winter. The bleak aspect of the Tibetan plain, as seen from the pass of Niti, somewhat westward of the lakes—shrubless, treeless, houseless—is compared by a traveller to the dreary moors of Upper Clydesdale, with stone and scanty brown herbage in the place of heather. Some of the most celebrated rivers in the world have their not unworthy source in the lofty table which forms the base of the Hindoo Olympus. The Ganges rises in the mountains immediately adjoining Ngari on the south-west, the Gogra, which, were size alone to decide the rights of river nomenclature, might perhaps claim the Ganges as a tributary, has its source in Ngari; so have the Indus, the Sutlej, and the Sanpoo. The Sanpoo, after flowing eastward behind the Himalayan range for some eight hundred miles, is lost to geography in the untraversed regions south-east of Lhassa. In the last century, D'Anville identified the Sanpoo with the Irawaddy, flowing through the whole extent of the Burman Empire to the sea at Rangoon; but the sagacity of Rennel suggested that the Burrampooter, emerging from unexplored mountains into the valley of Assam, and bearing to the sea a flood of waters greatly exceeding the Ganges, is the true Sanpoo. Turner, who, in his mission, reached the banks of the Sanpoo, indicates its course from the information of the Lamas in entire coincidence with Rennel's view.[11] In later years, however, Klaproth has revived the theory of D'Anville, apparently without good grounds. The Dihong, which is the principal contributor to the Burrampooter in Assam, though its course above the plains remains unexplored, bursts on our knowledge with a stream of such capacity as quite justifies the length attributed to it by the supposition that it is identical with the Sanpoo. And there seems little reason to doubt that the two great rivers, Ganges and Sanpoo, rising from the same lofty region, within 150 miles of one another, after diverging to an interval of some 17° of longitude, combine their waters in the plains of Bengal. In Rennel's time, the Burrampooter, after issuing westward from the Assam valley, swept south and south-eastward, and, forming with the Ganges a fluvial peninsula, entered the sea abreast of that river below Dacca. And so almost all English maps persist in representing it, though this eastern channel is now, unless in the rainy season, shallow and insignificant; the vast body of the Burrampooter cutting across the neck of the peninsula under the name of Jenai, and uniting with the Ganges near Pubna (about 150 miles north-east of Calcutta), from which point the two rivers, under the local name of Pudda, flow on in mighty union to the sea.

The upper part of the Indus valley, with the adjoining pastures, bears the name of Chanthan, or the Northern Plains, and produces the finest shawl wool. The export of this was long almost monopolised by the Ladakh market for the supply of Kashmeer, but much of it now finds its way direct to British India by the Sutlej valley and more eastern passes. The population is most scanty, and partially nomadic—the names which dot it on the map being mostly mere shepherd shelters, or clusters of nomad tents round a few houses of sunburnt brick. Tashigong, the only place of any extent, is the site of an important monastery. North of the Indus, and separated from it by a range of mountains, is the extensive salt lake of Pangkung. On the Singhkhabab, or Indus, farther westward, are strung, as it were, the principalities of Ladakh and Balti. These consist of a mass of mountain ranges rising from a base elevated 11,000 feet and more above the sea. This rugged country occupies the whole breadth of the Indus drainage from the Kashmeer Himalyas to the Karakoram mountains. The levels along the borders of the streams, and the slopes at the bases of the mountains, are diligently cultivated and irrigated, being first formed into terraced steps by a great accumulation of patient labour—a practice that prevails through the whole extent of the Himalaya Mountains. The uncultivated part of the country has the usual Tibetan aspect of bleakness and sterility.

Balti, or Little Tibet, is still independent under various chieftains, of whom the most powerful resides at Skardo, a considerable village, doing duty for a city where cities are so scarce. Ladakh was conquered by the Sikh feudatory, Goolab Singh, in 1835; and after the Sutlej victories of 1846, possession was confirmed to him by Lord Hardinge, at the same time that Kashmeer was made over to his tender mercies. Le, the capital, and probably the only aggregation of dwellings worthy of the name of town, situated in the valley of the Indus, and containing from 700 to 1000 houses, had before that period been visited by only two or three Europeans, of whom the persistent and unfortunate Moorcroft was the first in this century. Captain H. Strachey, of the Bengal army, belonging to the commission appointed to define the boundary between Ladakh and the Chinese or Tibetan dependencies, spent several years, between 1846 and 1849, in those regions; and far more accurate and full information than has ever yet been obtained may be expected from his researches. The whole population of Balti, and a half in Ladakh, are Sheea Mahommedans.

Returning to the centre of the table-land, we have, on the north-east of Ngari, extensive and almost unknown deserts, containing numerous salt-lakes, and haunted by a scanty nomad population, called by the Tibetans Sok, and supposed to represent the ancient Sacians. South-east lie the provinces of U and Tsang, or, conjointly, U-Tsang, to which the natives specially apply the name of Bód, and which may be considered as Tibet Proper. It is that part of the region to which we turn with most curiosity and interest, as containing the centre of spiritual and chief political supremacy—Lhassa, so long the unreachable Timbuctoo of the East. Lhassa is situated in the province of U, on a northern tributary of the Sanpoo, by which it is separated from Tsang. The latter territory is immediately governed by the Teshoo Lama, the potentate with whom we made an accidental acquaintance in Warren Hastings' time—our first and last brief but cordial intercourse with Tibet Proper. The provinces of U-Tsang are intersected by lofty alpine ranges, which, as they trend east and south-east, converge, but without uniting, insomuch that, in the inexpressibly rugged country where the frontiers of Tibet, Burma, and China approach one another, we find four parallel valleys traversed by four of the greatest rivers of Asia, embraced within the narrow space of one hundred miles. The Tibetan portion of this wild region, known as Kham, is inhabited by a rough race, of warlike and independent character, retaining many primitive superstitions beneath the engrafted Lamanism, and treating with little respect the Chinese pretensions to sovereignty. Through this region the missionaries Huc and Gabet were escorted back to China—the first Europeans, there can be little doubt, who ever trod those wilds. The plundering excursions of the Kham-pa extend all across the breadth of Tibet, and the fear of them haunts even the pilgrims to Kylass and the Manusaráwur Lake.

The Bhotan territory remains, which, from language, religion, manners, and political connection, may justly be considered as Tibetan, though occupying not the table-land north of the Himalaya, but the whole breadth of the range itself, from the Tsang country to Assam. Bhotan is a mass of mountains clothed in perpetual verdure, its slopes covered with forests of large and lofty trees; populous villages, girt with orchards, are scattered along the sides and summits of the spurs; every declivity of favourable aspect is carved into terraces, cultivated to the utmost, and carefully irrigated from the abundant streams. Nothing could be physically in greater contrast with the bleak and arid plains or rocky hills of Tibet. The people of Bhotan are a remarkably fine race. Scarcely anywhere else in the world shall we find an equal proportion of men so straight, so well made, and so athletic, many of them more than six feet high. Deformity is almost unknown, except that arising from goitre, which is very prevalent among them, as it is, indeed, over the whole extent of the Himalaya, and of the Turaee, or forest tract, at the base of the mountains; whilst Tibet Proper is entirely free from it. Tibetan geographers, according to Csoma de Körös, compare Ngari, with its fountains, to a tank, U-Tsang to the irrigating channels, and Kham to the field irrigated. We do not appreciate the aptness of the similitude. More intelligibly, European geographers have likened Tibet in form to a vast cornucopia pouring from its wide eastern mouth vast rivers forth, to fertilise the happier plains of China, Siam, Burma, and Assam.

All these countries, with the exception of Little Tibet, or Balti, and of Ladakh since its seizure by the Sikhs, acknowledge more or less directly the supremacy of the Dalai Lama at Lhassa, and, beyond him, that of China. Since the accession of the existing Manchoo dynasty to the throne of Pekin, they have always maintained two envoys at the court of Lhassa. Mr Prinsep aptly compares the position of these ministers to that of a British resident at the court of Luknow or Hyderabad. They do not, however, appear to meddle much with the ordinary internal administration, nor is their military force maintained in the country large. Besides a few hundred men at Lhassa, and guards established at intervals on the post-road from China, they take upon them the superintendence of the passes of the Himalaya, and see to the exclusion of Europeans by those inlets with unrelaxing rigour. In other parts of Tibet there are no Chinese.

The whole of this country, though so near the tropic, is the coldest and bleakest inhabited by a civilised people on the surface of the earth, if we except Siberia. Forests of cedar, holly, and other Himalayan trees, are met with in the valleys of the extreme east, bordering upon China. Lhassa is surrounded with trees of considerable size; and a few straggling willows or poplars, artfully pollarded for the multiplication of their staves, are found by the watercourses of Ladakh and Tibet Proper; but the vast extent of the table-land is bare and desolate, and as devoid of trees as Shetland. The ancient Hindoos are said to have esteemed it as a vault over hell. The only shrubs that dot the waste are the Tartaric furze, or the wizened wormwood, with its white parched stalks, or perchance, in more favoured spots, a few stunted rose-bushes. Though the winter is long and severe, snow is not frequent in the valleys. The air is of a purity and brilliance which dazzles and fatigues the eye, and its excessive dryness produces effects analogous to those of the scorching May winds in the torrid plains of Hindostan;—

"The parching air
Burns frore, and cold performs the effect
of fire;"

vegetation is dried to brittleness, and leaves may be rubbed between the fingers into dust. Mahogany chests, and furniture belonging to Turner's party, which had stood the climate of Bengal for years, warped and split under the cold dry winds of Tibet. Wood seems subject to no other cause of injury from time.

As might be expected, tillage is scanty, and the population depend much on imported food. Villages are small, seldom containing more than twenty houses. These, in the better parts of the country, have a cheerful appearance, the dwellings being all white-washed, with doors and windows picked out in red or yellow. Lhassa would seem to be the only city of Tibet worthy of that title: the Chinese geographers, indeed, and native itineraries, speak of one or two others, but nothing is known of them. Teshoo Loombo on the Sanpoo, ten days from Lhassa, though the residence of the second personage in Tibet, seems to be merely a monastic establishment. Indeed, the large convents are probably, after Lhassa, the most considerable nuclei of population in the country; and Lhassa itself has perhaps grown to importance as an appendage to the Potála, or residence of the Grand Lama.

No European traveller has described this celebrated city before M. Huc, and we cannot say that he succeeds in bringing its aspect before his readers very vividly. When within a day's journey of the city, one of the most rugged mountain passes of the many which the missionaries had met with, in their journey from the east of Tartary, still intervened. "The sun was about to set as we completed our descent of the innumerable zigzags of the mountain path. Issuing into a wide valley, we beheld on our right Lhassa, the famous metropolis of the Buddhistic world. The multitude of aged trees, which encircle the city as with a girdle of foliage—the lofty white houses, terminating in flat roofs surrounded by turrets—the numerous temples, with their gilded canopies—the Boodhala, crowned by the palace of the Dalai Lama—all unite to give Lhassa a majestic and imposing appearance." The city is stated to be nearly two leagues in circumference, and it is now without walls. Outside the suburbs are numerous gardens planted with the large trees mentioned above. The main streets are wide, well laid-out, and tolerably clean in dry weather; but the dirt of the suburbs is unspeakable. The houses, which are large, and several stories high, are whitewashed, according to universal Tibetan custom, the doors and windows being bordered in red or yellow. M. Huc does not enter into any detail of their architecture, but we may suppose that these houses are analogous in character to what is seen in other parts of Tibet. The lower part of a house presents lofty dead walls, pierced only by two or three air-holes; above these are from one to half-a-dozen tiers of windows with projecting balconies, and, over all, flat, broad-brimmed roofs, at a variety of levels; add to this, that the houses run into one another so strangely that it is difficult to determine the extent of each mansion, and that the groups of building generally contract in extent as they rise. On the whole, we may conceive a Tibetan city like a cluster of card-houses of various altitudes. In the suburbs of Lhassa there is one quarter entirely built of the horns of sheep and oxen set in mortar. The construction is solid, and the effect highly picturesque, the varied colour and texture of the two species facilitating the production of a great variety of patterns. Lhassa bustles with the continual traffic of crowds attracted by commerce or devotion from all parts of Asia, and presents an astonishing variety of physiognomy, costume, and language.

Less than a mile north of the town a conical craggy hill rises like an island from the middle of the wide valley. On this hill, Potala, (the name of which M. Huc writes Boodhala, and interprets, questionably,[12] to mean "Mount of Buddha,") is the residence of the Tibetan flesh-and-blood divinity. It is a great cluster of temples and other buildings, terminating in a lofty four-storied edifice towering over the others, crowned by a dome or canopy entirely covered with gold, and encircled by a range of gilded columns. From this lofty sanctuary the great Lama may contemplate on festival days the crowds of his adorers moving in the plain, and prostrating themselves at the foot of the holy hill. The subordinate buildings of this acropolis serve as residences to a crowd of Lamas of all ranks, who form the court and permanent attendants of the sacred sovereign. Two avenues lined with trees lead from the city to the Potala, generally thronged with mounted lamas of the court, and with pilgrims from a distance, who, as they move along, thread their long rosaries, and mutter the sacred symbol of their faith. The crowds around the Potala are in continual motion, but generally grave and silent, as if in religious abstraction. It is probably etiquette to be so.

Unfortunately our missionaries have ventured on no graphic illustrations; and the only attempt that we know of to delineate this interesting citadel of Buddhism, is a plate contained in the narrative of Grueber and Dorville's journey, given by Athanasius Kircher in his China Illustrata. It is meagre enough, but yet looks genuine, and not a mere Amsterdam concoction.

A singular legend is stated by Huc to exist, both at Lhassa and among the dwellers by the Koko-Noor, (the great salt lake on the north-east frontier of Tibet,) that the waters of that basin formerly occupied a subterraneous site beneath the capital city; but, on the breaking of a charm which detained them there, they passed off under ground, and flooded the valley where the lake now exists. It is curious that Turner met with a version of this same tradition on the southern frontier of Tibet; but there it was related that Buddha, in compassion to the few and wretched creatures who then inhabited the land, drew off the waters through Bengal. A similar tradition regarding the valley of Katmandoo exists in Nepaul.

The people of Tibet are of the great Mongolian family, and exhibit its characters in a very marked degree;—platter face, with prominent cheek-bones, button-hole eyes and upright eyelids, squashed nose, wide mouth, retiring chin, scant beard, coarse black hair, deeply-marked and weather-beaten countenances; naturally of a pale-brown colour, but tanned to any depth of copper, not without a ruddy tint at times; of a considerable variety of stature. The English traveller who, in traversing the steep valley-sides of the Himalaya, comes for the first time on a party of Tibetans driving southward their flock of sheep and goats—each little quadruped, like a camel from Lilliput, laden with some twenty pounds of salt or borax—is struck at once with the idea that he has stumbled on a group of Esquimaux out of Parry's voyages. These quaint, good-humoured people frequent the fairs of the British hill-territory, to exchange their salt for wheat and barley; and sometimes they get so far from home as to astonish, with unwonted apparition, the evening promenaders at Simla or Mussooree.

These uncouth peasants, though perhaps the best ethnographic studies, are not to be taken as samples of the culture and refinement of Tibet. The higher classes of the country have only been known to those few travellers who have penetrated to the capitals—Ladakh on the one side, Lhassa and Teshoo Loombo on the other. All these seem to have been most favourably impressed with the kindly and simple, but by no means unpolished manners of the educated class; the plain and unaffected language, the mild and unassuming demeanour, of the ruling prince at Teshoo Loombo—which Turner, at the same time, says was characteristic of all well-educated Tibetans—fully accords with the character of the regent-minister at Lhassa, as he appears in the later narrative of M. Huc.

Dark woollen cloth is the standard material of dress, formed into a wide frock, trousers, and leggings, the last replaced in the wealthy by boots of Russia, or other costly leather. Over all is worn a capacious mantle of cloth, sometimes lined with fur. From a red girdle depend various purses, containing the wooden teacup inseparable from a Tibetan, flint and steel, and other odds and ends. Gay broad-brimmed hats are in vogue at Lhassa, but are rarer in the west. The women dress much like the men, and plait the hair in narrow tresses hanging on the shoulders. On the top of the head the Ladakh women wear a flat lappet of cloth or leather, descending in a peak behind, stuck over with beads of turquoise, amber, and cornelian; and the back hair is gathered in a queue, which is lengthened by tassels of coloured worsted intermixed with shells, bells, and coins, until it nearly touches the ground. Though not veiled, like the Moslem women, with muslin or calico, their charms are subjected to a much more efficacious disguise. Before leaving home, every respectable woman at Lhassa plasters her face with a black sticky varnish like raspberry jam, which gives her an aspect scarcely human. The practice is said at Lhassa to have been introduced some centuries ago, in order to check the immorality which was then rampant in the city. But it appears to be widely diffused, and is probably ancient. Rubruquis refers to something like it in the thirteenth century. Grueber and Dorville, who travelled through Tibet and Nepaul in 1661, say, "The women of these kingdoms are so hideous that they are liker demons than human creatures; for through some superstition, instead of water they always use a stinking oil to wash with; and with this they are so fetid and so bedaubed that they might be taken for hateful hobgoblins." But tastes differ, and the same unguent which the missionaries represent as intended to render the women hideously unattractive, or at least a modification of it in fashion at Ladakh, Moorcroft appears to think is adopted as a cosmetic. From all the fathers could learn, the black varnish has not altogether reformed Tibetan morals.

The strange, repulsive custom of polyandry, or the marriage of one woman to several brothers, is diffused over the greater part of Tibet, though it is not mentioned by Huc as existing at Lhassa. It is not confined to the lower ranks, but is frequent also in opulent families. Turner mentions one instance in the neighbourhood of Teshoo Loombo, where five brothers were living together very happily under the same connubial compact.

Moorcroft speaks of three meals a-day as the practise of Ladakh, but this extraordinary symptom of civilisation does not seem to be general. In Eastern Tibet, regular meals are not in vogue; the members of a family do not assemble to dine together, but "eat when they're hungry, drink when they're dry." We remember to have heard a graphic description of the Tibetan cuisine from a humourous shikaree, or native Nimrod, of our Himalayan provinces. "The Bhoteea folk," he said, "have a detestable way of eating. They take a large cooking-pot full of water, and put in it meat, bread, rice, what not, and set it on the fire, where it is always a-simmering. When hungry, they go and fish out a cupful of whatever comes uppermost, perhaps six or seven times a-day. Strangers are served in the same way. If a man gets hold of a bone, he picks it, wipes his hands on his dress, and chucks it back into the pot; so with all crumbs and scraps, back they go into the pot, and thus the never-ending, still beginning mess stews on."

Tea, however, is a staple article of diet, and is served on all occasions. A vast quantity is imported, artificially compressed into the form of solid bricks of about eight pounds weight, in which shape it requires little packing, and forms a most handy article for barter. Instead of infusing it after our fashion, they pulverise a piece of the brick and boil it in water, with a proportion of salt and soda; then churn it up with a quantity of butter, and serve the mess in a teapot. At Tassisudon, Turner admired the dexterity (comparable to that of a London waiter manipulating a bottle of soda-water) with which the raja's attendant, before serving the liquid, "giving a circular turn to the teapot, so as to agitate and mix its contents, poured a quantity into the palm of his hand, which he had contracted to form as deep a concave as possible, and hastily sipped it up." When taken as a meal, tsamba, or the flour of parched barley, is added, each man mixing his own cupful up into a sort of brose or gruel with his five natural spatulæ. Meat is abundant, but is taken as an extra or embellishment, rather than as a staple of diet. In cookery, the people appear to have none of the genius of their neighbours, either of India or of China. Hares, winged game, and fish, though abundant, are not eaten, so that they have scarcely any meat but mutton, (excepting occasionally yak beef,) and their mutton they have but three ways of serving—viz., absolutely raw, frozen, and boiled. The frozen meat having been prepared in winter may then be kept throughout the year, and carried to any part of Tibet. European travellers generally commend this meat, which undergoes no process of cookery.

The Tibetans, being no great water-drinkers, the liquid next in importance to tea is an acidulous beverage made from fermented barley, known through more than 20° of longitude as chong. Turner absurdly calls it whisky, but it is rather analogous to beer. It requires a large quantity to produce intoxication, but, nevertheless, that result is attained.

One of the peculiar customs which prominently mark the whole Tibetan race is the use of the khata, or scarf of ceremony. This is a fringed scarf of Chinese silk gauze, which is interchanged on all occasions of ceremonious intercourse, even the most trivial, and in every rank of society. They are to be had of qualities and prices suited to all pockets, and no Tibetan travels without a stock of them. In paying formal visits, in asking a favour, or returning thanks for one, in offering a present or delivering a message to a superior, the khata is presented. On the meeting of friends after long separation, the first care is to exchange the khata. In epistolary correspondence, also, it is customary to enclose the khata; without it, the finest words and most magnificent presents are of no account. Turner mentions that the Bhotan Raja once returned a letter of the Governor-General's, because it was unaccompanied by this bulky but polite incumbrance.

Of all the quaint modes of salutation among men, that in fashion at Lhassa is surely the quaintest and most elaborate; and we can fancy that it affords room for all the graces of a Tibetan Chesterfield. It consists in uncovering the head, sticking out the tongue, and scratching the right ear! and these three operations are performed simultaneously.

Tibet has always been a subject of curiosity, not more from its inaccessibility than from the singular nature of its government, resting, as is well known, in the hands of a sovereign, elective under a singular and superstitious system, who, by the name of Dalai (the ocean) Lama, is not only king and spiritual father, but also the embodied divinity of his people. The Buddhistic faith, numbering as its adherents a greater population than any other existing creed, when driven from its native soil, India, (in which it has long been totally extinct, though its gigantic footsteps still mark the surface in all parts of the peninsula,) spread over Nepaul, Ceylon, the kingdoms of the Transgangetic Peninsula, China, Corea, Japan, Tibet, and the whole Mongolian region to the confines of Siberia. The essential idea of Buddhism appears to be a peculiar development of the notion which runs through nearly all the Asiatic pagan philosophies, and which, interwoven with the fantasies of the innumerable Gnostic sects, once spread its influence to the centre of the Christian world—viz., that all the external world is but a transient manifestation of the Divine Being, and the souls of all living creatures are emanations from Him; that these souls, whilst included in material and perishable bodies, are in a state of imperfection, degradation, and suffering; and that the great object of intelligent creatures should be final release from the clog of the flesh, and abdication of all personal identity, to be absorbed in the universal soul. Considerable difference of opinion exists among the learned as to the true epoch of Sakya Muni or Gautama, the Indian deified saint, or Buddha, who was the propagator of the doctrine in the particular form which derives its appellation from him; but the latest of the various periods assigned for his death is 543 B.C. After a long life spent in preaching humility, self-denial, meditation on the divine perfections, and the celebration of solemn ritual services of praise and worship, he is believed himself to have been, at death, absorbed into the divine essence on account of his great attainments in sanctity. Sakya was followed by a succession of sacred personages, who are to be regarded either as mortals whose attainments in sanctity have reached, in repeated transmigrations, to a divine eminence, though not yet to the final absorption of a Buddha, or as voluntary incarnations of souls whose virtue had attained to freedom from the necessity of renewed terrestrial life, but who chose to dwell again on earth in order to aid men in the attainment of perfection, and facilitate their reunion with the universal soul. It is this part of the system which has assumed an exaggerated prominence in Tibet and Mongolia, where these regenerations have gradually, in the general faith, taken the form of continual and manifold incarnations of Buddha, or the Divine Being.

In combination with this doctrine, and the stress laid on meditation and ritual worship, a vast proportion of the inhabitants, both in Tibet and Mongolia, one at least out of every family where there are more than one son, devote themselves to a religious life, and many of these dwell together in monastic communities. The Shabrongs or Regenerate Buddhas are so numerous that many of the chief convents possess one. These personages, though all esteemed divine, appear somehow to vary in spiritual consideration as well as temporal grandeur, as one Marian idol in the Church of Rome has more sanctity and miraculous power ascribed to it than another has. The most eminent and most venerated of all is the Dalai Lama. The exercise of his authority is in theory unlimited; he is the centre of all government. But since, in the capacity of manifested divinity, he could not, without derogation of his sacred character, mix himself up with the numerous trivialities of human affairs, few questions are actually submitted to him; he is regarded only in the most amiable light, as absorbed in religious duty, or interfering only to exercise the most benign attributes. The general administration of the government is carried on by another personage, also a Shabrong, nominated by the supreme Lama, and known as the Nomé-Khan; by the Chinese and the Western Tibetans, he is generally called King of Tibet Proper. The Nomé-Khan is appointed for life, and can only be removed by a coup-d'état. He is assisted in administration by four lay ministers called Kalongs.

The provinces are governed by ecclesiastical princes receiving their investiture from the Dalai Lama, and acknowledging his supremacy, but enjoying apparently a good deal of practical independence.

The most important of these princes, and in spiritual estimation but little below the Dalai Lama himself, is the Punjun Rimboochee of Jachee (or Teshoo) Loombo, known to the British in India as Teshoo Lama. The intercourse between the Anglo-Indian Government and this prince arose as follows:—In 1772 the Deb Raja, or sovereign of Bhotan, laid claim to and seized Kooch Bahar, a district at the mouth of the Assam Valley, adjoining Rungpoor. A sepoy force was sent to expel the hill people, which they speedily accomplished, pursuing the enemy to their mountains. The raja, alarmed for his own dominions, applied for the intercession of Teshoo Lama, who was then regent, spiritual, and political, of the whole of Tibet, during the minority of the Lhassa pontiff. The Lama sent a deputation to Calcutta, with a letter to Warren Hastings, then Governor—"an authentic and curious specimen," says Turner, "of his good sense, humility, simplicity of heart, and, above all, of that delicacy of sentiment and expression which could convey a threat in terms of meekness and supplication." The deputation, and the presents which it bore from a country so mysterious and inaccessible, excited intense interest at Calcutta—the Governor at once acceded to the Lama's intercession, and determined to take advantage of the opportunity afforded to acquire knowledge of those obscure regions, and to find, possibly, new outlets to British commerce, under circumstances so favourable and unlooked for. He accordingly despatched Mr George Bogle, a civilian, with presents and specimens of articles of trade. Bogle started in May 1774. There was a good deal of delay and difficulty made on the part of the Tibetan government about granting him a passport; and it was not till October that he arrived at the residence of the Lama. The two seem, during Bogle's visit, which continued till April 1775, completely to have gained each other's confidence and good-will. The Englishman, on his return, always spoke of the Lama as one of the most able and intelligent men he had ever known, maintaining his rank with the utmost mildness of authority, and living in the greatest purity and simplicity of manners. Turner, whose mission will be mentioned presently, found these praises confirmed by the very strong and unusual impression of regard which the sovereign's gentleness and benevolence had left among his subjects. On the other hand, the Lama showed his confidence in Bogle, by remitting to him some time after a considerable sum of money, to be expended in the erection of a temple and dwelling-house on the banks of the Hoogly, for the use of his votaries in Bengal. The characteristic reason assigned for this wish was, that during the numerous series of the Lama's regenerations, Bengal was the only country in which he had been born twice. In 1779, when the Lama, after repeated invitations, visited Pekin, he, in the same friendly spirit, requested Mr Bogle to go round to Canton, promising to obtain the Emperor's permission for his proceeding to the capital. This singular tryst came to nothing in consequence of the death of the Lama at Pekin—in accordance with a fatality which seldom spares the vassal princes of Central Asia on their visits to the Chinese court—and that of Mr Bogle himself about the same time. The brother and minister of Teshoo Lama communicated the circumstances in letters to Mr Hastings, stating that they were in continual prayer for the accomplishment of the transmigration; and, soon after intelligence of this important event was received, the governor sent a renewed deputation as bearers of congratulations, in which (in the lax Anglo-Indian spirit of that age) the continued identity of the Lama was fully recognised. The result of Captain Samuel Turner's mission, as regarded the establishment of commercial intercourse with Tibet, was nothing, but it obtained for us at least a very interesting and valuable book. Turner had the privilege of an interview with the young Lama, at that time past eighteen mouths old; and as the occasion was unique of its kind, we abstract his account of it. The envoy found the infant placed in great form on an elevated mound, covered with embroidered silk; on the left stood the child's father and mother, on the right the officer specially appointed to wait on him. Turner, advancing, presented a white scarf, and put into the Lama's hands the Governor-General's present of a string of pearls and coral. The other things were set down before him, and having then exchanged scarfs with the father and mother, the Englishmen took their seats on the Lama's right. The infant turned towards them, and received them with a cheerful look of complacency. "During the time we were in the room," says Turner, "I observed that the Lama's eyes were scarcely ever turned from us, and when our cups were empty of tea he appeared uneasy, and, throwing back his head, and contracting the skin of his brow, continued to make a noise, for he could not speak, until they were filled again. He took some burnt sugar out of a golden cup containing confectionary and, stretching out his arm, made a motion to his attendant to give it to me. He sent some in like manner to Mr Saunders, who was with me." Turner then made him a speech, expressing the Governor-General's grief at hearing of his decease in China, and his joy at the news of his reappearance; his hope that their former friendship might be increased, and that there might be extensive communication between his votaries and British subjects. "The little creature turned, looking steadfastly towards me with the appearance of much attention while I spoke, and nodded with repeated but slow movements of the head, as though he understood and approved every word, but could not utter a reply.... His whole attention was directed to us; I must own that his behaviour on this occasion appeared perfectly natural and spontaneous, and not directed by any external action or sign of authority."

The existing Punjun or Teshoo Lama is described by Huc from report, in 1816, as a man of about sixty years of age. It is, therefore, very probable that he is the same person who was seen by Turner in infancy; and if so, he has fulfilled the promise of mark, then precociously exhibited. He has great fame throughout Tibet and all Tartary, his partisans claiming for him spiritual power at least equal to that of the Dalai Lama, and never naming him without deep reverence. His influence has waxed the more from the fact that three successive Dalai Lamas have perished before attaining majority. He is said to be of majestic port, and surprising vigour for his age. All pilgrims to the holy sites of Tibet visit Jachee Loombo, and, after making their offerings to the Teshoo, are enrolled in the brotherhood of Gylongs instituted by him, of which all Tartar Buddhists aspire to be members, and which, doubtless, will one day play an important part in the history of that part of Asia. The votaries of Teshoo Lama are satisfied that he is acquainted with all languages, and converses with the pilgrims of all countries, "each in the tongue in which he was born." His predecessor, Panjun Irtinnee, being a native of Ladakh, was able to converse with Mr Bogle in Hindustanee, and as the bystanders believed their unknown language to be English, this strongly confirmed their belief in the polyglot powers of their chief.

Prophecies of coming events, all tending to the glorification of Punjun Remboochee, are in the mouths of all; and that personage is said to be preparing himself, by the practice of military exercises, and the accumulation of horses, for his warlike career.

The Lama next in influence and sanctity appears to be the Geesoo-Tamba, whose residence is at Oorga or Kooren, among the Khalka Tartars, beyond the great Gobi desert, on the banks of the Toola river, which flows northward into the Siberian Lake Baikal. This potentate, from his special influence over the Mongol tribes, is an object of great jealousy at Pekin. In 1839 he alarmed that court by announcing an intended visit. Great stringency was employed in reducing the number of his retinue, but his progress through Mongolia was a continued ovation, the Tartars thronging on all sides to meet and worship him. Geesoo Tamba's visit was hurried over, and, according to the rule in such cases, he died on his way back.[13] Most of the living Buddhas, even in the Tartar convents, are natives of Tibet, and the influence of the Chinese Emperor has been exerted to arrange that the Geesoo Tamba shall always seek his transmigration there.

Other sanctities of celebrity are the Chang-kia-fo, a sort of grand almoner to the court of Pekin, and the Saja-fo, residing near the Himalayas, who has a singular and special mission. He is day and night in prayer for the perpetual fall of snow on the peaks of the mountains; for, according to Tibetan tradition, behind that range dwells a savage race, which only bides the thawing of the snows to pass the barrier, massacre the tribes of Bod, and seize their country.

The story related by Tavernier Grueber and Father Giorgi,[14] regarding the degrading superstition with which the basest personal relics of the reigning Lama were cherished by his votaries, was utterly denied to both Bogle and the French missionaries. The former ascribes the origin of the story to the Lama's practice of distributing little balls of consecrated flour, which the superstition of his more ignorant votaries may have converted into what they pleased.

Convents are exceeding numerous both in Tibet and Mongolia. In the former their number is said to amount to 3000, some near Lhassa containing as many as 15,000 members.

These convents consist usually of groups of whitewashed cells or cottages, clustered together on a hill-side, interspersed with temples of fantastic architecture. Opposite the great entrance to a temple is a sort of altar, above which the idols are enshrined, usually of handsome Caucasian features and colossal size, seated cross-legged. Before the chief image, (representing Maha-muni or Sakya,) and on a level with the altar, is a gilded seat for the Regenerate or Grand Lama of the convent, the rest of the apartment being occupied by rows of carpeted benches.

At prayer time, a conch blown at the temple-gate summons the members to their devotions. After making three prostrations to the head, they take their places, according to precedence, on the benches, seating themselves cross-legged and vis-à-vis, as choir and anti-choir. When a bell, rung by the master of the ceremonies, gives the signal, all commence muttering in a low tone a preparatory act of devotion, as they unrol on their knees the rubrical form of the day. After this short recitation is an interval of profound silence. The bell rings again, and then rises a psalmody of responsive choirs, in a grave and melodious tone. The Tibetan prayers, broken usually into verses, and composed in a style of rhythmic cadence, lend themselves with marvellous effect to concerted recitation. At intervals of repose, fixed by the rubrics, the instrumental band executes a piece of music. In the Tartar choirs this is described by Huc as a confused and stunning jumble of instruments, all the performers emulous in din. Turner, however, in a similar description of the service, speaks more respectfully of the Tibetan instrumental music. According to the latter authority also, the Tibetans possess a musical notation. Their instruments are generally on a large scale;—sliding trumpets from six to ten feet long, which Moorcroft describes as of very deep and majestic intonation; kettle drums; cymbals, highly mellow and sonorous; gongs, hautboys; a large shallow drum, mounted on a tall pedestal: these, with the human tibia and the sea-conch, compose their religious band.

From the earliest traveller to the court of the Grand Khan, to the last vice-regal aide-de-camp whose arduous duties have led him up the Sutlej to the pleasant slopes of Cheenee in Kunawur, whence Ramsay of Dalwolsie dealeth law to the millions of India from under the ripening grapes, all witnesses of the Lamaitic worship have been struck with the extraordinary resemblance of many features of the ecclesiastical system and ritual to those of the Roman Catholic Church. Rubruquis, who travelled in the thirteenth century, mentions a Mongolian people called Jugurs, (probably the Chakars of M. Huc,) whom he brands as rank idolaters, but at the same time admits that it is most difficult to distinguish many of their observances from those of the Catholic Church. They had holy candles, rosaries, and conventual celibacy. The further description of these Jugurs identifies them as Buddhists. "They placed their ideas of perfection in the silent and abstracted contemplation of the Divinity. They sit in the temples on two long forms, opposite to each other, repeating mentally the words, Om mam hactami, but without uttering a word." The missionaries of after days are struck by the same resemblances. Father Grueber, in 1661, states that at Lhassa there are two kings—one civil, the other sacred. "They regard the latter as the true and living God, the eternal and celestial Father. Those who approach prostrate themselves before him and kiss his feet, exactly as is done to his holiness the Pope; so showing the manifest deceits of the devil, who has transferred the veneration due to the sole Vicar of Christ to the superstitious worship of barbarous nations, as he has also, in his innate malignity, abused the other mysteries of the Christian faith." Father Desideri, without directly making such comparisons, indicates more marvellous coincidences than any one else; in fact, he drew some aid from a lively imagination when he deduced that the people of Ladakh had some idea of the Trinity, because they sometimes used the singular and sometimes the plural in speaking of the Deity, and from the form of the sacred symbol constantly in their mouths, which he simplifies into Om ha hum! "They adore," he goes on to say, "one Urghien(?), who was born seven hundred years ago. If you ask them if he was God or man, they will answer sometimes that he is both God and man, and that he had neither father nor mother, but was born of a flower. Nevertheless, they have images representing a woman with a flower in her hand, and this, I was told, was the mother of Urghien. They adore several other persons, whom they regard as saints. In their churches you see an altar covered with an altar-cloth; on the middle of the altar is a sort of tabernacle, where, according to them, Urghien resides, although at other times they will assure you that he is in heaven." Turner and Moorcroft, Protestant laymen, were as much struck by the resemblance of the choral service to the mass as the Roman priests, and none testify to it more frequently than our latest travellers, Huc and Gabet. "The crosier, the mitre, the Dalmatica, the cope or pluvial which the Grand Lamas wear in travelling, the double-choired liturgy, the psalmody, the exorcisms, the censer swung by five chains, and opening and shutting at will; the benedictions given by the Lama, in stretching his right hand over the head of the faithful; the rosary, the ecclesiastical celibate, the spiritual retreats, the worship of the saints; fasts, processions, holy water," (and they might have added, the tonsure, the ringing of bells during service, the conclave assembled in a temple to elect a pontiff, and the appellation of Eternal Sanctuary applied to Lhassa, the Rome of their faith, by the Tartars,) "in all these numerous particulars do the Buddhists coincide with us." The matter-of-fact Moorcroft describes a Lama of Ladakh as dressed almost like a cardinal. Allowing for some accidental and some exaggerated similarities, more analogy remains than can well be explained, without supposing that the Lamas may have borrowed and adapted parts of the Church ritual from the Nestorians, who were early diffused over Asia; or perhaps that the churches of the latter, sinking in corruption and ignorance, had merged in the sea of superstition which surrounded them, leaving only some corrupted relics of external rites floating on the surface to mark that a church of Christ had once existed there.

As the Christian world is divided into Papist and Protestant, and the body of Islam into Soonnee and Sheea, so also the Lamas have their two great sects, the Gelook-pa and Dok-pa, distinguished by the colour of their caps—yellow being adopted by the former, red by the latter.[15] Celibacy is binding only on the Gelook-pa, but all who aspire to superior sanctity profess it. They all abstain from taking animal life, and some of especial austerity will not even take vegetable life, deeming it unlawful to cut down a tree unless it be withered, or to gather fruit unless it be ripe. Strong drink is forbidden to all the sects. The reform which originated the sect of the Gelook-pa, now predominant over Tibet and Mongolia, and claiming the Emperor himself as one of its adherents, was the work of Tsongkhapa, a celebrated Tibetan teacher of the fourteenth century. He is traditionally stated to have derived his doctrine from a mysterious western stranger, endowed with great learning and Slawkenbergian nose. To the innovations in the Lamaitic worship introduced by Tsongkhapa, the missionaries ascribe many of the more striking resemblances to Roman ritual, and they feel inclined to believe that the mysterious stranger from the West may have been a Catholic missionary, whose teaching was imperfectly received or apprehended. The large nose they conceive may only be an indication of the European physiognomy from the Mongolian point of view. We have a counterpart portrait of the Mongolian from a Caucasian pencil, in Benjamin of Tudela, who speaks of the "Copperal Turks" as having no noses, but only two holes in the face through which they breathe. So also Rubruquis, when he was presented to the wife of Scacatai, a Tartar Khan, verily thought she had cut and pared her nose till she had left herself none at all!

Among other Romanising rites we find something analogous to masses for the dead. In a temple at Ladakh, Moorcroft witnessed the consecration of food for the use of the souls of those condemned to hell, without which, it was believed, they would starve. The chief Lama consecrated barley and water, and poured them from a silver saucer into a brass basin, occasionally striking two cymbals together, and chaunting prayers, to which an inferior Lama from time to time uttered responses aloud, accompanied by the rest in an under-tone. Somewhat different appears to have been the annual festival in honour of the dead, or "All Souls," of which Turner gives a striking description. As soon as it became dark, a general illumination was displayed on the summits of all the buildings of the monastery; the tops of the houses on the plain, and of the distant villages, were also lighted, exhibiting altogether a brilliant spectacle. Though accustomed to esteem illuminations the strongest expressions of public joy, Turner now saw them exhibited as a solemn token of melancholy remembrance—an awful tribute of respect to the innumerable generations of the dead. Darkness, silence, interrupted occasionally by the deep slow tones of the kettle-drum, trumpet, gong, and cymbal; at different intervals, the tolling of bells, and loud monotonous repetition of sentences of prayer, sometimes heard when the instruments were silent, all united to produce an impression of seriousness and awe. Remarkably similar is the description given by the Frenchmen of the nocturnal litanies which they witnessed when resident in the convent of Koonboom.[16] Another impressive devotional practice is mentioned by the last travellers, and one which is the more pleasing, as not being confined to the clergy. "They have at Lhassa a touching custom, which we were almost jealous of meeting among unbelievers. In the evening, as the daylight is passing into twilight, all the Tibetans suspend their occupation, and meet in groups, according to sex and age, in the public places of the town. As soon as the parties are formed, all sit down on the ground, and begin to chaunt prayers in a slow and subdued tone. The aggregation of the sound of prayer, rising all over the city, produces a vast and solemn hum of harmony, which strangely moves the spirit."

The Buddhistic, symbol, or mystic form of concentrated prayer, Om mani padme hom, is not only heard from every mouth, or silently repeated on the rosary, but is to be seen written everywhere—in streets, public places, walls of apartments, on the fringes of the ceremonial scarf, on the flags that wave from the house-tops, and from cairns on the mountains; engraven on the rocks, carved on monuments by the way, or formed with stones, in gigantic spelling, on the hill-side, so as to be legible at considerable distances. Rich Buddhists maintain travelling Lamas, to go about, like Old Mortality, with hammer and chisel, multiplying the sacred sentences on the faces of the cliffs, and on stones by the highway. The words are Sanscrit, and came from India with the Buddhist faith in the seventh century. The Lamas say that these sacred words include an infinity of doctrine, which the life of man suffices not to survey, but their infinitesimal amount of meaning to the uninitiated is said to be—"Oh, the precious lotus.—Amen!"

The great difference between the Tibetan lama-serais and the convents of Romanised Europe appears to be, that the members of the former, though subjected to the same rule, and under one superior, cannot be said to live in common, the various gradations of wealth and poverty being as distinctly marked among them as among the laity. Lamas in rags may sometimes be seen begging of their wealthy brethren in the same convent. The revenue of the convent foundation, if it has one, is distributed at intervals in the form of a scanty supply of meal, in rations proportioned to rank in the hierarchy. Occasionally donations from pilgrims also fall to be divided. Sometimes a pilgrim "stands" tea to the whole convent—no small expense, when it numbers several thousand members. Many Lamas augment their means by practising as physicians, fortune-tellers, or exorcists; by various handicrafts, or by keeping retail-shops for the benefit of their brethren. Others are occupied in printing or transcribing religious books. The character is alphabetic, being a modification of the Nagari or Sanscrit letters introduced by Tongmi Sambodha, one of the first missionaries of Buddhism; but printing is, of course, conducted on the Chinese block system. The leaves are loose, printed on both sides, placed between two wooden boards, and tied with a yellow band. The character used in correspondence differs greatly from that of the printed books and literary MSS., being much more rounded and fluent. It is, however, perhaps, like our own writing, only a modification of the other adapted to a current hand.

The classic Tibetan literature appears to consist in two or three great collections, or cyclopædias, in many volumes, the greater part translated in remote times from ancient Sanscrit works. From the abstracts given in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, by the one European who has mastered the subject, Alexander Csoma de Körös,[17] these books appear to be a dreary wilderness of puerile metaphysics and misplaced labour.

According to M. Huc, the Lama physicians reckon 440 maladies affecting the human frame, neither more nor less. Their medical books, which the students of the faculty have to learn by heart, consist of a mass of aphorisms, more or less obscure, and a number of recipes. Most of their medicines are vegetable simples, generally mild and inoffensive. The number of their "simples," however, includes "laudamy and calamy." At least, they have the art of preparing mercury, and use it as a specific, producing salivation. This result they promote by gagging the patient with a stick. Their diagnosis they derive principally from the pulse, professing to discover the seat of disease from its peculiar vibratory motion rather than its frequency. They have not the Chinese horror of bleeding, and practise cupping by help of a cowhorn and oral suction. Small-pox is held in great dread; indeed, they scarcely attempt to treat it, but endeavour to save the uninfected by cutting off all communication at the risk of starving the sufferers. The infected house or village is often razed to the ground.

Some of the baser class of the Lamas seek notoriety and lucre by juggling and disgusting feats, professing to rip open their stomachs, to lick red-hot iron bars, &c. &c., and to perform other such exploits. Messrs Huc and Gabet knew a Lama who was generally reputed able at will to fill a vessel of water by means of a certain form of prayer. They never could get him to perform in their presence, however. He said that, as they had not the same faith, the attempt would be unsuccessful, and perhaps dangerous. He obliged them by reciting his charm, which, it must be confessed, reads so like a Dr Faustus contract, that one cannot but suppose that the preconceived ideas of the good missionaries have lent it a little colouring. The Lama was, perhaps, after all, only an electro-biologist. Respectable Lamas affect to frown on such displays, but wink at them occasionally, for profit's sake.

Lamas of an ascetic spirit, not content with the duties of the convent, sometimes seek the seclusion which the desolate wilds of their country offer so plentifully, dwelling in eyries on the pinnacles of hills, either cut in the rock, or formed of timber attached to the cliff like swallows' nests. Sometimes these eremites, like Simon of the pillar, renounce all intercourse with the world—depending for their sustenance on the gifts of the devout dropt into a sack, which is let down from the inaccessible cell by a long cord.

Convents of nuns also exist, both in Tibet Proper and in Ladakh; they do not, however, appear to have been visited by any traveller, and the French fathers make no mention of them.

The inhumation of the dead is entirely unpractised in Tibet. The body of the sovereign Lama alone is preserved entire, and deposited in a shrine which is ever after looked on as sacred, and visited with religious awe. The bodies of inferior Lamas are burnt, and their ashes carefully preserved, to be enclosed in small metallic images, which have places assigned them in cabinets ranged in the sacred buildings. Sometimes, but not often, bodies are committed to the waters of lakes or rivers; but the common disposal of the dead is by making them over—

——κυνεσσιν
οιωνοισι τε πασι—

either in carrying the corpses to the tops of lofty eminences, where the divided limbs are left for a prey, or, in depositing them in regular golgothas assigned for the purpose. These are enclosed yards, having openings left in the foot of the walls for the admission of dogs and wolves. But the most popular form of this practice is when the body is cut in pieces at once, and given to the dogs to eat. For the interment, or rather the incanition, of persons of distinction, in certain convents sacred dogs are maintained, which are set apart to this office. Strabo, Cicero, and Justin mention such customs as current among the nations of Central Asia. They prevail not only in Tibet, but among the nomad tribes of Mongolia, and appear to have no connection with the existing religion of these races. The practice of the Parsees is well known to be of a similar character. The most sanctified Lamas are privileged to eat and drink out of the skulls of bodies which have been thus devoured by beasts. Rosaries also are made from these skulls, and the larger bones are often converted into trumpets.

The profane vulgar, though uninstructed in the tedious liturgic lore which the Lamas acquire, not without plentiful corporal chastisement in the days of their pupilage, are enabled to achieve a meritorious amount of devotion by the aid of certain whirligigs, or prayer-mills—cylinders of wood or pasteboard, inscribed with the words of prayer, and rotating on a spindle. These chu-kor, or turn-prayers, which at one time, as a pet subject of allusion with Thomas Carlyle, almost rivalled Thurtell's gig, are either portable or stationary, generally turned by hand, but often by water-power; and in the Tartar huts they are suspended over the fireplace, so as to rotate like smoke-jacks, in behalf of the peace and prosperity of the family.

Various penances are performed by the pilgrims who visit the sacred places. Some make the circuit of the convent buildings laden with enormous piles of sacred books. The task achieved, they are reckoned to have recited all the prayers which form their load. Others perform the same circuit in measuring their length upon the ground at each step. This is a task often undertaken by great numbers following each other in single file; and if the convent be extensive, the day, from dawn till dusk, is occupied in the task. Some penitents, instead of making the tour of a single convent, perform long journeys in this fashion. The practice is known in India; and we remember to have heard of a Hindoo worthy, who, some sixty or seventy years ago, undertook to measure his way from Hurdwar to Calcutta, prophesying the while that, when he should have achieved his dusty task, the days of the Feringees' power would be numbered. Great was the twisting of mustaches and the furbishing of tulwars among the disaffected; but, alas! in passing Cawnpoor the unlucky prophet made his last prostration; he was laid hold of by the general, and hanged.

We had purposed to conclude this paper with a sketch of the journeys of previous travellers in Tibet, and some details of the last very interesting one from which we have derived many particulars, but we have now room for only very brief indications.

The name of Tibet appears to have first become known to Europe in the itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish Rabbi, who travelled to the far East about the year 1160. He mentions that country as producing musk, but errs widely in placing it only four days' journey from Samarkand.

In the succeeding century, when the flood of Mongolian conquest, under Jenghiz and his successors, dissolved all political barriers, and brought the civilisations of the East and West for the first time in contact, a greater amount of intercourse ensued between Europe and interior Asia than has ever occurred before or since. At the noise of the coming Tartars, Europe stood amazed, and even the bewildered Danes were deterred for one season from starting for their herring fishery on our northern shores, lest they should fall into the hands of this mysterious foe. Pouring over Hungary and Poland to the frontiers of Silesia, they defeated and cut in pieces the duke of that country with his army, and it seemed as if the knell of Christendom had sounded, when providentially the death of the great Khan summoned the host back into Tartary; and the invasion of Western Europe, though often threatened, was never resumed. Embassies from the Roman Pontiff and European princes, at first of intercession and supplication, afterwards on more equal terms, when the dread of the Khan had passed away, were despatched and reciprocated. Monks of Flanders, France, and Italy, visited the seat of the Grand Khan, and a Latin archiepiscopate was established in Pekin. French artists worked in gold and silver for the court of Kara-Korum, and a banished Englishman was the first ambassador from the Tartars to the king of Hungary; whilst Mongols of distinction found their way to Rome, to Barcelona, to Paris, to London, to Northampton. "The arts, the faith, and the language of the nations of Asia became a subject of curiosity and study, and it was even proposed to establish a Tartar chair in the university of Paris."[18]

During this extraordinary intercourse, which continued for a century and a half, the lines of travel eastward lay generally to the north of Tibet, and hints of its existence are rare and slight. Marco Polo, indeed, who travelled in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, devotes two of his Herodotean chapters to "the Province of Thibet." A few particulars, such as the existence of powerful dogs, of the musk animal, and the current use of salt in barter, are recognisable, but the country referred to is apparently the wild and rugged region of the Si-fan, towards the east and north-east of Tibet.

Oderic of Portenau, a travelling friar, who died in 1331, mentions Tibet, and is the first who speaks of the Grand Lama as the pope of the idolaters.

The Romish missionaries of later times made repeated attempts to establish themselves in the Trans-Himalayan regions. The first who appears to have succeeded in penetrating them was Antonio d'Andrada, a Portuguese Jesuit, with three companions of his order. In 1624 they ascended the Ganges by Hurdwar and Srinuggur to Budrinath, a celebrated place of Hindoo pilgrimage on the eastern branch of the sacred river. Apprehending hindrances to their advance, they made a desperate attempt to cross the pass into Tibet, (probably the Niti, or one of those nearer Lake Manusaráwur,) whilst it was still deep in snow, and without a guide. They succeeded, after frightful suffering, in surmounting the pass, but, finding the country at their feet a trackless sheet of snow, were compelled to return. Waiting for the usual convoy after the melting of the winter snow, they again effected the passage, and proceeded to what they call Rudac, the capital of Tibet. There is a fort so called (Radokh or Rohtuk) beyond the Indus, near the head of the Pangkung Lake; but Ladakh or Le is more likely to have been the place intended.

Though it seems scarcely credible that four strangers should have found their way twice across the Himalayan passes unguided, and before the regular season of transit, and yet survive to tell the tale, it must be said that Andrada's description of their Himalayan travels, in other respects, bears every mark of truth. The precipitous paths along the Ganges, the files of pilgrims shouting as they trudged to Budrinath, the demon-like Jogees whom they encountered, the straight and lofty pines and cypresses, the large rose-bushes, and forests of flowering trees, (rhododendron,) the rope bridges, the sufferings in the snow and from the attenuated air, are all plainly drawn from actual experience.

The next visitors to Tibet, and the first Europeans, so far as we know, who reached Lhassa, were the Fathers Albert Dorville and J. Grueber of the Chinese mission. They started from Pekin in June 1661, and travelled through China to Sining-fu, on the north-west frontier. From this place their route probably coincided with that of Huc and Gabet, who reached the same place from Eastern Mongolia. Their journey thence to Lhassa, Grueber describes as extending for three months through the deserts of Kalmuk Tartary, alternately sandy and mountainous. After some stay at Lhassa, they proceeded over the mountain range of "Langur, the highest existing, so that on its summit travellers can scarcely breathe on account of the subtlety of the air; nor can it be passed in summer, on account of the virulent exhalations of certain herbs, without manifest danger to life." Descending into the kingdom of Necbal, (Nepaul,) they passed some time at the capital, Cudmendou (Katmandoo). Quitting Nepaul, they entered the kingdom of Maranga (the Morung, or forest tract below the hills.) Proceeding by Mutgari (Mooteeharee probably, in Tirhoot) to Battana (Patna) on the Ganges, and thence to Benares, they reached Agra after 214 days' travelling from Pekin, exclusive of stoppages. Dorville died of fatigue shortly after the accomplishment of this heroic journey. The narrative, as abstracted in Kircher's China Illustrata, is adorned with some rather good cuts, most of which appear to have been derived from genuine sketches.

In the fifteenth volume of Lettres Edifiantes is an epistle dated from Lhassa, 10th April 1716, by Father Hipolito Desideri, a Jesuit. It relates his journey from Goa to Delhi, where he was joined by a brother missionary; thence by Lahore over the Pir Punjál to Kashmeer, and, after a residence of six months there, across the passes of the Himalayas, to Le or Ladakh, which he describes as the royal fortress of the kingdom of Great Tibet, or Buton. Whilst making arrangements to settle at Ladakh, and commencing the study of the language, the fathers heard for the first time of a third Tibet, (viz. the Lhassa country, in addition to Little Tibet or Balti, and Great Tibet, or Ladakh,) and thought it necessary to proceed to explore it. The journey occupied them from August 1715 to March 1716. Desideri and his comrade are the only Europeans who have ever travelled from Ladakh to Lhassa; but, unfortunately, they give no particulars of their route except these dates, and even the great delay which they indicate is not accounted for.

Previous to this, a Capuchin mission had visited Lhassa via Nepaul in 1707, and a few years later, a dozen brethren of that order were established there under Father Horace della Penna. They sent home flourishing accounts of their success; but their additions to our knowledge of the country were very meagre. About 1754 this mission appears to have been expelled, and found refuge for a time in Nepaul. Some fifty volumes, the relics of the mission library, were, in 1847, recovered from Lhassa by Mr Hodgson, through the courtesy of the Grand Lama himself, and were transmitted to Europe to be presented to Pio Nono, whose reputation was then fresh and fragrant. Some itineraries and other curious particulars, derived from the correspondence of the Lhassa mission, are buried, among a mass of crude learning and rubbish, in a quarto published at Rome in 1762, under the name of Alphabetum Tibetanum, by Antonio Giorgi, an Augustin friar.

Of the missions of Bogle and Turner we have already spoken. In 1811, a Mr Manning succeeded in reaching Lhassa by their route, but was arrested and sent back by the Chinese. He died soon after without publishing any particulars of his journey. The sacred lakes of Ngari have been visited by Moorcroft, Captains Henry and Richard Strachey, and one or two more. Ladakh and the adjoining districts have been explored by the two former travellers, the Cunninghams, and others. But within this century, save Manning, no European, till Huc and Gabet, had penetrated to Tibet Proper. The enthusiastic Hungarian scholar, who would have gone with advantages possessed by none else, was cut off just as he deemed this object of his cherished hopes attainable.

A few words remain to be said more particularly of the work which suggested this paper. These need be few, because a translation of the whole work has been announced since we commenced writing.

The book which the missionaries have produced is not altogether satisfactory. It too well justifies its title of Souvenirs by the lamentable paucity of dates, of which there are not half-a-dozen in the whole narrative of their two years' pilgrimage. Even the period of their starting is not stated at the time, and is only to be distinctly gathered from some retrospective calculations. Their geographical starting-point, too, is as obscure as the chronological one. Our maps help us little in following the details of their travels; and that which is inserted in their book is of as little aid as any other, being, in fact, dated five years previous to their journey. Nor, we fear, will they be found to have added much to the materials of future geographers; their work contains no indication of a single bearing or altitude, nor indeed had they the necessary instruments. The possession, indeed, of MS. maps would have endangered their lives in any collision with Chinese authority, such as actually befel them at Lhassa; but many valuable data might have been recorded without graphical embodiment. The worthy men, however, make no pretensions to science; they record of the Ko-ko-noor or Blue Lake on the north-east frontier of Tibet, that it has a flux and reflux of tide, without any further particulars of so marvellous a phenomenon, though they were some time encamped on its banks: they ascribe unquestioningly their sufferings, in passing certain lofty mountains, to poisonous exhalations from the soil; and they quit Tibet without a word as to the vexed question regarding the course of the Sanpoo. But they have given us a most readable and interesting personal narrative of a life of continued hardships, and of frequent suffering and danger in remote regions, the routes through which were partly never before recorded in detail, and partly never before trodden by any European.

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[FOREST LIFE IN CANADA WEST.][19]

Ladies of Britain, deftly embroidering in carpeted saloon, gracefully bending over easel or harp, pressing, with nimble finger, your piano's ivory, or joyously tripping in Cellarian circles, suspend, for a moment, your silken pursuits, and look forth into the desert at a sister's sufferings! May you never, from stern experience, learn fully to appreciate them. But, should fate have otherwise decreed, may you equal her in fortitude and courage. Meanwhile, transport yourselves, in imagination's car, to Canada's backwoods, and behold one, gently nurtured as yourselves, cheerfully condescending to rudest toils, unrepiningly enduring hardships you never dreamed of. Not to such hardships was she born, nor educated for them. The comforts of an English home, the endearments of sisterly affection, the refinement of literary tastes, but ill prepared the emigrant's wife to work, in the rugged and inclement wilderness, harder than the meanest of the domestics, whom, in her own country, she was used to command. But where are the obstacles and difficulties that shall not be overcome by a strong will, a warm heart, a trusting and cheerful spirit?—precious qualities, strikingly combined by the lady of whose countless trials and troubles we have here an affecting and remarkable record.

The Far West of Canada is so remote a residence, and there is so much oblivion in a lapse of twenty years, that it may be necessary to mention who the authoress is who now appeals (successfully, or we are much mistaken) to the favour of her countrymen, and more especially of her countrywomen. Of a family well known in literature, Mrs Moodie is a sister of Miss Agnes Strickland, the popular and accomplished historical biographer. In 1831, Miss Susanna Strickland published a volume of poems. Had she remained in England, she in time, perhaps, might have rivalled her sister's fame as one of the most distinguished female writers of the day. But it was otherwise ordained. In 1832 she sailed, as Mrs Moodie, an emigrant to Canada. Under most unfavourable circumstances, she still from time to time took up the pen. The anxieties and accidents of her forest life, her regrets for the country she loved so well, and had left perhaps for ever, and, subsequently, the rebellion in Canada, suggested many charming songs and poems, some of which are still extremely popular in our North American colony. Years passed amidst hardships and sufferings. At last a brighter day dawned, and it is from a tranquil and happy home, as we gladly understand, that the settler's brave wife has transmitted this narrative of seven years' exertion and adventure.

Inevitable hardships, some ill luck, some little want of judgment and deliberation, make up the history of Captain and Mrs Moodie's early days in Canada. "I give you just three years to spend your money and ruin yourself," said an old Yankee hag with whom the Captain was concluding the purchase of a wretched log-hut. It scarcely took so long. Borrowing our colours from Mrs Moodie's pages, we may broadly sketch the discomforts of the emigrant's first few months in Canada. These were passed near the village of C——, on the north shore of Lake Ontario. A farm of one hundred and fifty acres, about fifty of which were cleared, was purchased by Captain Moodie, for £300, of a certain Q——, a landjobber.

"Q——," says the Captain, who has contributed two or three chapters to his wife's book, "held a mortgage for £150, on a farm belonging to a certain Yankee settler, named Joe H——, as security for a debt incurred for goods at his store. The idea instantly struck him that he would compel Joe H—— to sell him his farm, by threatening to foreclose the mortgage. I drove out with Mr Q—— next day to see the farm in question. It was situated in a pretty retired valley, surrounded by hills, about eight miles from C——, and about a mile from the great road leading to Toronto. There was an extensive orchard upon the farm, and two log-houses, and a large frame-barn. A considerable portion of the cleared land was light and sandy; and the uncleared part of the farm, situated on the flat rocky summit of a high hill, was reserved for 'a sugar bush,' and for supplying fuel."

Pleased with the place, Captain Moodie bought it, and, having done so, had leisure to repent his bargain. Of the land he got possession in the month of September; but it was not till the following summer that the occupants of the house could be prevailed upon to depart. Until then the new comers dwelt in the wretched hut already mentioned. Even to this hovel Mrs Moodie's English habits of order and neatness imparted something like comfort; but a still greater evil, beyond her power to remedy, was connected with her residence. Her nearest neighbours were disreputable Yankee settlers.

"These people regarded British settlers with an intense feeling of dislike, and found a pleasure in annoying and insulting them when any occasion offered. They did not understand us, nor did we them, and they generally mistook the reserve which is common with the British towards strangers, for pride and superciliousness.

"'You Britishers are too superstitious,' one of them told me on a particular occasion.

"It was some time before I found out what he meant by the term 'superstitious,' and that it was generally used by them for 'supercilious.'"

All that poor Mrs Moodie endured from her reprobate neighbours, could not be told in detail within the compass of a much larger work than hers. But we may glean a tolerable idea of her constant vexations and annoyance from her first volume, which contains sketches, at once painful and humorous, of the persecutions to which she was subjected. Impudent intrusion and unscrupulous borrowings were of daily occurrence, varied occasionally by some gross act of unneighbourliness and aggression. Although evidently a person of abundant energy and spirit, Mrs Moodie, partly through terror of these semi-savages, and partly from a wish to conciliate and make friends, long submitted to insolence and extortion. The wives and daughters of the Yankee settlers—some of whom had "squatted," without leave or license, on ground to which they had no right, made a regular property of her. Every article of domestic use, kettles and pans, eatables, drinkables, and wearables, did these insatiable wretches borrow—and never return. They would walk into her house and carry off the very things she at the moment needed, or come in her absence and take her gown from the peg, or the pot from the fire. The three families from which she had most to endure were those of a red-headed American squatter, who had fled his own country for some crime; of "Uncle Joe," the former proprietor of her farm, and still the occupant of her house; and of "Old Satan," a disgusting and brutal Yankee, who had had one eye gouged out in a fight, and whose face was horribly disfigured by the scars of wounds inflicted by his adversary's teeth. A pertinacious tormentor, too, was old Betty Fye, who lived in the log shanty across the creek. Having made Mrs Moodie's acquaintance, under pretence of selling her a "rooster," she became a constant and most unwelcome visitor, borrowing everything she could think of, returning nothing, and interlarding her discourse with oaths, which greatly shocked the good-tempered English lady.

"'Everybody swears in this country,' quoth Betty Fye. 'My boys (she was a widow with twelve sons) all swear like Sam Hill; and I used to swear mighty big oaths, till about a month ago, when the Methody parson told me that if I did not leave it off I should go to a tarnation bad place; so I dropped some of the worst of them.'

"'You would do well to drop the rest; women never swear in my country.'

"'Well, you don't say! I always hear'd they were very ignorant. Will you lend me the tea?'"

Tea to-day—it was something else to-morrow. Mrs Moodie tried every means of affronting her, but long without success. The most natural and effectual plan would have been to refuse all her demands; but to this Mrs Moodie, perhaps from unwillingness to disoblige, was tardy in having recourse. At last she got rid of her by quoting Scripture.

"The last time I was honoured with a visit from Betty Fye, she meant to favour me with a very large order upon my goods and chattels.

"'Well, Mrs Fye, what do you want to-day?'

"'So many things, that I scarce know where to begin. Ah, what a thing it is to be poor! First, I want you to lend me ten pounds of flour to make some Johnie cakes.'

"'I thought they were made of Indian meal?'

"'Yes, yes, when you've got the meal. I'm out of it, and this is a new fixing of my own invention. Lend me the flour, woman, and I'll bring you one of the cakes to taste.'

"This was said very coaxingly.

"'Oh, pray don't trouble yourself. What next?' I was anxious to see how far her impudence would go, and determined to affront her, if possible.

"'I want you to lend me a gown and a pair of stockings. I have to go to Oswego, to see my husband's sister, and I'd like to look decent.'

"'Mrs Fye, I never lend my clothes to any one. If I lent them to you, I should never wear them again.'

"'So much the better for me,' (with a knowing grin.) 'I guess if you won't lend me the gown, you will let me have some black slack to quilt a stuff petticoat, a quarter of a pound of tea and some sugar; and I will bring them back as soon as I can.'

"'I wonder when that will be. You owe me so many things that it will cost you more than you imagine to repay me.'

"'Since you're not going to mention what's past, I can't owe you much. But I will let you off the tea and the sugar, if you will lend me a five-dollar bill.'"

This was too much for even Mrs Moodie's patience. She read the incorrigible Betty a sharp lecture upon her system of robbing under colour of borrowing, and concluded by saying she well knew that all the things she had lent her would be a debt owing to the day of judgment.

"'S'pose they are,' quoth Betty, not in the least abashed at my lecture on honesty, 'you know what the Scripture saith, "It is more blessed to give than to receive."'

"'Ay, there is an answer to that in the same book, which doubtless you may have heard,' said I, disgusted with her hypocrisy, 'The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again.'

"Never shall I forget the furious passion into which this too apt quotation threw my unprincipled applicant. She lifted up her voice and cursed me, using some of the big oaths temporarily discarded for conscience' sake. And so she left me, and I never looked upon her face again."

Uncle Joe was another pleasant neighbour, and brought up his children to resemble himself. Mrs Joe would occasionally stroll over to visit Mrs Moodie, and exult over the unaccustomed toils to which the young English wife and mother submitted with a cheerfulness that did her infinite honour. It was a rough and hard life, even for men, in that Canadian loghouse; much worse, then, for a delicate woman, and worst of all for one who arrived there with an infant, and whose family rapidly augmented.

"For a week I was alone," writes Mrs Moodie, in the early days of her exile, "my good Scotch girl having left me to visit her father. Some small baby-articles were needed to be washed, and after making a great preparation, I determined to try my unskilled hand upon the operation. The fact is, I knew nothing about the task I had imposed upon myself, and in a few minutes rubbed the skin off my wrists, without getting the clothes clean. The door was open, as it generally was, even during the coldest winter days, in order to let in more light and let out the smoke, which otherwise would have enveloped us like a cloud. I was so busy that I did not perceive that I was watched by the cold, heavy, dark eyes of Mrs Joe, who, with a sneering laugh, exclaimed, 'Well, thank God! I am glad to see you brought to work at last.'"

Further, the amiable Mrs Joe declared her intense hatred of all Britishers, and her hearty wish that her unoffending neighbour might be brought down upon her knees to scrub the floor. Mrs Moodie had sense and dignity enough merely to smile at her vulgar malignity. The impudence of these people knew no bounds. The same evening, Mrs Joe sent over two of her offspring to borrow something she needed of the woman she had spitefully abused in the morning.

During Mrs Moodie's abode near C——, Old Satan got married for the fourth time. This was the occasion of a charivari, a custom dating from the French occupation of Canada, and still kept up there. Mrs Moodie has an amusingly naïf chapter on this subject, concerning which she has collected some curious anecdotes. It is hardly necessary to explain that a mismatch—of a young and an old person—is the usual pretext for a charivari.

"The idle young fellows of the neighbourhood disguise themselves, blackening their faces, putting their clothes on hind part before, and wearing horrible masks, with grotesque caps on their heads, adorned with cocks' feathers, and bells. They then form in a regular body, and proceed to the bridegroom's house, to the sound of tin kettles, horns, drums, &c. Thus equipped, they surround the house, just at the hour when the happy couple are supposed to be about to retire to rest, beating upon the door with clubs and staves, and demanding of the bridegroom admittance to drink the bride's health, or in lieu thereof, a certain sum of money to treat the band at the nearest tavern."

Mrs Moodie expresses all a woman's indignation at what she styles "a lawless infringement upon the natural rights of man." The charivari is usually bought off—she mentions an instance when thirty pounds were disbursed by an antiquated swain who had wedded a handsome widow—but sometimes the victim resists, and the consequences are serious. Shortly before old Satan's bridal, a tragical affair had taken place at one of these saturnalia.

"The bridegroom was a man in middle life, a desperately resolute and passionate man, and he swore that if such riff-raff dared to interfere with him, he would shoot at them with as little compunction as if they were so many crows. His threats only increased the mischievous determination of the mob to torment him; and when he refused to admit their deputation, or even to give them a portion of the wedding cheer, they determined to frighten him into compliance by firing several guns, loaded with peas, at his door. Their salute was returned from the chamber-window, by the discharge of a double-barrelled gun, loaded with buck-shot. The crowd gave back with a tremendous yell. Their leader was shot through the heart, and two of the foremost in the scuffle dangerously wounded. They vowed they would set fire to the house, but the bridegroom boldly stepped to the window and told them to try it, and before they could light a torch he would fire among them again, for his gun was reloaded, and he would discharge it at them as long as one of them dared to remain on his premises. They cleared off."

In point of amusement there is little difference between the first and the second volumes of Mrs Moodie's book—which, however, is not intended merely to amuse, but also as "a work of practical experience," written for the benefit of, and conveying useful hints to, persons contemplating emigration to Canada. The first volume is the gayest of the two; there is a vein of great humour in Mrs Moodie's descriptions and sketches of her neighbours, and of her wild Irish servant, John Monaghan, who gave Uncle Joe an awful thrashing for purloining the captain's hay; and of Mrs D., the Yankee lady, who considered her English neighbours shocking proud because they did not eat with their "helps," but was of opinion that all negroes were children of the devil, for that "God never condescended to make a nigger." But it is in the second volume that the interest is strongest, and at times becomes intense. Disgusted with their neighbours, Captain and Mrs Moodie left their farm at C——, and removed to the township of Douro, forty miles off, in the backwoods, where they had friends and relatives settled, and where the society—consisting chiefly of English, Irish, and Scotch gentlemen, recently come from Europe, and many of them half-pay officers—was more congenial to their tastes and habits. Unfortunately, about this time Captain Moodie sold his commission, in consequence of an intimation in the newspapers that half-pay officers must either do so or join a regiment. This was not enforced in the case of officers settled in the colonies, and the captain greatly repented his haste; the more so, as he was induced to invest the proceeds of his sale in shares in a steamboat on Lake Ontario. Q——, the landjobber, appears to have led him into this investment. He received no interest on his shares, and when, some years afterwards, the boat was sold, he got back only a fourth of his capital. The mistake he made in parting with his half-pay was the cause of great privations and anxiety.

"It was a bright frosty morning," says Mrs Moodie, "when I bade adieu to the farm, the birthplace of my little Agnes, who, nestled beneath my cloak, was sweetly sleeping on my knee, unconscious of the long journey before us into the wilderness.... It was not without regret that I left Melsetter, for so my husband had called the place, after his father's estate in Orkney. It was a beautiful, picturesque spot; and, in spite of the evil neighbourhood, I had learned to love it; indeed, it was much against my wish that it was sold. I had a great dislike to removing, which involves a necessary loss, and is apt to give to the emigrant roving and unsettled habits. But all regrets were now useless; and, happily unconscious of the life of toll and anxiety that awaited us in those dreadful woods, I tried my best to be cheerful, and to regard the future with a hopeful eye."

Most nobly, when the toil and anxiety came, did this high-hearted woman bear up against them. Severer hardships and trials were perhaps never endured, for so long a period, by one of her delicate sex. At first, affairs looked promising in the forest. A timely legacy supplied means to purchase and clear land and to build a house; a considerable sum still remained in hand, and a good income from the steamboat stock was looked upon as certain. The first spring in the forest was spent in comparative ease and idleness.

"Those were the halcyon days of the bush. My husband had purchased a very light cedar canoe, to which he attached a keel and a sail; and most of our leisure hours, directly the snows melted, were spent upon the water. These fishing and shooting excursions were delightful.... We felt as if we were the first discoverers of every beautiful flower and stately tree that attracted our attention, and we gave names to fantastic rocks and fairy isles, and raised imaginary houses on every picturesque spot which we floated past during our aquatic excursions. I learned the use of the paddle, and became quite a proficient in the gentle craft."

They received visits from the Indians, a number of whom (of the Chippewa tribe) frequented a dry cedar-swamp hard by, fishing, shooting, and making maple-sugar, baskets, and canoes. They were friendly and communicative, grateful for the slightest kindness, never intrusive or offensively familiar; in short, they were born gentlemen, and in every respect a perfect contrast and immeasurably superior to the Yankee squatters at C——. Mrs Moodie devotes the greater part of a most interesting chapter to stories and traits of her red friends. No attention, however small, was lost upon these warm-hearted people. One cold night, late in autumn, six squaws asked shelter of Mrs Moodie. It was rather a large party to lodge, but forest hospitality is not stinted. There was "Joe Muskrat's squaw" and "Betty Cow," and an old white-haired woman, whose scarlet embroidered leggings showed her to be a chief's wife. After they had all well supped, mattresses and blankets were spread on the parlour floor for their use, and Mrs Moodie considerately told her servant to give the aged squaw the best bed.

"The old Indian glanced at me with her keen, bright eye; but I had no idea that she comprehended what I said. Some weeks after this, as I was sweeping my parlour floor, a slight tap drew me to the door. On opening it I perceived the old squaw, who immediately slipped into my hand a set of beautifully embroidered bark trays, fitting one within the other, and exhibiting the very best sample of the porcupine-quill work. While I stood wondering what this might mean, the good old creature fell upon my neck, and kissing me, exclaimed, 'You remember old squaw—make her comfortable! Old squaw no forget you. Keep them for her sake,' and before I could detain her she ran down the hill with a swiftness which seemed to bid defiance to years. I never saw this interesting Indian again, and I concluded that she died during the winter, for she must have been of a great age."

When fortune frowned on Nono-cosiqui, "the humming-bird," (the name given to Mrs Moodie by the Indians, in allusion to the pleasure she took in painting birds,) when her purse and pantry were alike empty, and, in Indian phrase, "her hearthstone was growing cold," many an acceptable supply of much-needed food was brought to her by her red friends.

"Their delicacy in conferring these favours was not the least admirable part of their conduct. John Nogan, who was much attached to us, would bring a fine bunch of ducks, and drop them at my feet, 'for the papoose [child,]' or leave a large muskinonge on the sill of the door, or place a quarter of venison just within it, and slip away without saying a word, thinking that a present from a poor Indian might hurt our feelings, and he would spare us the mortification of returning thanks."

The coolness and courage of these Indians are remarkable. Mrs Moodie tells a story of a squaw who was left by her husband in charge of some dead game, and who, whilst sitting carelessly upon a log, with his hunting-knife in her hand, heard a cracking amongst the branches, and, turning round, saw a bear within a few paces of her.

"It was too late to retreat; and seeing that the animal was very hungry, and determined to come to close quarters, she rose, and placed her back against a small tree, holding her knife close to her breast, and in a straight line with the bear. The shaggy monster came on. She remained motionless, her eyes steadily fixed upon her enemy, and as his huge arms closed around her, she slowly drove the knife into his heart. The bear uttered a hideous cry, and sank dead at her feet. When the Indian returned, he found the courageous woman taking the skin from the carcass of the formidable brute."

Mrs Moodie was not likely to emulate such feats as this. She had a horror of wild beasts, and was afraid even of cattle. Her dread of lions, tigers, and other unamiable carnivora, was the reason of her finding herself in Canada. Her husband had a property in South Africa, where he had passed many years, and whither the fine climate and scenery made him desirous to return. But his wife would not hear of it, and, when he tried to remove her exaggerated terrors, referred him triumphantly to the dangerous encounters and hairbreadth escapes recorded in a book of his own, called Ten Years in South Africa. A European woman's fear of tigers and rattle-snakes is natural enough, and let none impute want of courage to Mrs Moodie. The hero of a hundred fights might feel nervous, if perched on the top-gallant-yards of a frigate, whose captain might prefer boarding a French three-decker to riding at a bull-fence. Mrs Moodie's courage was not of the bear-fighting sort, but of a higher kind—moral, rather than physical. We read with admiration and deep sympathy of her presence of mind and intrepidity upon many trying occasions—when her house, for instance, was blazing over her head, and she alone was there to rescue her four children and such portions of her worldly possessions as her strength enabled her to carry out of the cedar-log dwelling, whose roof "was burning like a brush heap, and, unconsciously, she and her eldest daughter were working under a shelf upon which was deposited several pounds of gunpowder, procured for blasting a well. The gunpowder was in a stone-jar, secured by a paper stopper; the shelf upon which it stood was on fire." As to her fortitude under severe suffering—from bitter cold and other causes—and the perseverance with which she toiled, even at farm-labour, they are beyond praise.

"In the year 1835, my husband and I," she says, "had worked hard in the field; it was the first time I had ever tried my hand at field-labour, but our ready money was exhausted, and the steamboat stock had not paid us one farthing; we could not hire, and there was no help for it. I had a hard struggle with my pride before I would consent to render the least assistance on the farm, but reflection convinced me that I was wrong—that Providence had placed me in a situation where I was called upon to work—that it was not only my duty to obey that call, but to exert myself to the utmost to assist my husband, and help to maintain my family."

Most affecting is the account that follows, of hopes disappointed and hardships endured, in the years 1836 and 1837. To pay off debts—incurred chiefly for clearing land, and in confident expectation of deriving an income from the steamboat—Captain and Mrs Moodie resorted to a pinching economy. Milk, bread, and potatoes, were for months their only fare. Tea and sugar were luxuries not to be thought of. "I missed the tea very much," says the poor English lady, who, on an anchorite's fare, performed a day-labourer's task, hoeing potatoes, and cheerfully sharing with her husband the rude toils of the field. "We rang the changes on peppermint and sage, taking the one herb at our breakfast, the other at our tea, until I found an excellent substitute for both in the root of the dandelion." This root, roasted crisp, and ground, proved a very good imitation of coffee. Squirrel—stewed, roast, and in pies—was a standard dish at the dinner-table in the bush. In a trap set near the barn, often ten or twelve were caught in a day. But the lake was the great resource.

"Moodie and I used to rise by daybreak, and fish for an hour after sunrise, when we returned, he to the field, and I to dress the little ones, clean up the house, assist with the milk, and prepare the breakfast. Oh, how I enjoyed those excursions on the lake!—the very idea of our dinner depending upon our success added double zest to the sport."

Even here there was some compensation. The strange, Robinson-Crusoe-like existence had its joys as well as its sorrows. Who can doubt that, seasoned by labour, squirrel pie had, for the dwellers in the forest, such savour as few epicures find in pasty of choicest venison? The warm breath of summer, too, alleviated the hardships of the poor emigrants. But winter came, and, with winter, privation and misfortune.

"The ruffian squatter P——, from Clear Lake, drove from the barn a fine young bull we were rearing, and for several weeks all trace of the animal was lost. We had almost forgotten the existence of poor Whisky, when a neighbour called and told Moodie that his yearling was at P——'s, and that he would advise him to get it back as soon as possible. Moodie had to take some wheat to Y——'s mill, and as the squatter lived only a mile farther, he called at his house; and there, sure enough, he found the lost animal. With the greatest difficulty he succeeded in regaining his property, but not without many threats of vengeance from the parties who had stolen it. To these he paid no regard; but a few days after, six fat hogs, on which we depended for all our winter store of animal food, were driven into the lake and destroyed. The death of these animals deprived us of three barrels of pork, and half-starved us through the winter. That winter of '36, how heavily it wore away! The grown flour, frosted potatoes, and scant quantity of animal food, rendered us all weak, and the children suffered much from the ague."

Under these circumstances, great was the glee when a stray buck was shot. Spot, Katie's pet pig, had to be killed, in spite of the tears and entreaties of its little owner, for the family were craving after a morsel of meat. Here is a melancholy note in the diary of the emigrant's wife:—

"On the 21st May of this year, my second son, Donald, was born. The poor fellow came in hard times. The cows had not calved, and our bill of fare, now minus the deer and Spot, only consisted of bad potatoes, and still worse bread. I was rendered so weak by want of proper nourishment that my dear husband, for my sake, overcame his aversion to borrowing, and procured a quarter of mutton from a friend. This, with kindly presents from neighbours—often as badly off as ourselves—a loin of young bear, and a basket containing loaf of bread, some tea, fresh butter, and oatmeal, went far to save my life."

Think of this, ye dainty dames, who, in like circumstances, heap your beds with feathers, and strew the street with straw. Think of the chilly forest, the windy log-house, the frosted potatoes, the five children, the weary, half-famished mother, the absence of all that gentle aid and comfort which wait upon your slightest ailment. Think of all these things, and, if the picture move you, remember that the like sufferings and necessities abound nearer home, within scope of your charity and relief.

Quitting, for a while, the sad catalogue of her woes, Mrs Moodie launches forth into an episode which fills one of the most characteristic chapters of her work. In the midst of these hard times, an Englishman—with whom Captain Moodie had once travelled in the mail to Toronto, and whom he had invited to call on him, should he come into his part of the country—dropped in upon them one evening, proposing to remain for the night. He was their inmate for nine months. Mrs Moodie disliked him, from the very first day, for he was a surly, discontented, reckless scamp, but somehow there was no getting rid of him. He grumbled over his first meal of salt pork, dandelion coffee, and heavy bread; and he grumbled almost daily, until the happy morning when he left them for good and all. Malcolm (as Mrs Moodie chooses to call him) told his host that he was in hiding from the sheriff's officers, and should esteem it a great favour to be allowed to remain a few weeks at his house. The captain was far too good-natured and hospitable to refuse his request. "To tell you the truth, Malcolm," said he, "we are so badly off that we can scarcely find food for ourselves and the children. It is out of our power to make you comfortable, or to keep an additional hand, without he is willing to render some little help on the farm. If you can do this, I will endeavour to get a few necessaries on credit, to make your stay more agreeable." The proposition suited Malcolm to a hair. By working for his keep, he got rid of the obligation, and acquired a right to grumble. As to the work he did, it was really not worth speaking of. Mrs Moodie had a sort of rude bedstead made for him out of two large chests, and put up in a corner of the parlour. Upon that he lay, during the first fortnight of his stay, reading, smoking, and drinking whisky and water from morning till night. There was a mystery about the fellow which he did not care fully to clear up, but portions of his history oozed out.

"He was the son of an officer in the navy, who had not only attained a very high rank in the service, but, for his gallant conduct, had been made a Knight-Companion of the Bath. He had himself served his time as a midshipman on board his father's flag-ship, but had left the navy, and accepted a commission in the Buenos-Ayrean Service during the political struggles in that province. He had commanded a sort of privateer under the government, to whom, by his own account, he had rendered many very signal services. Why he left South America, and came to Canada, he kept a profound secret. He had indulged in very vicious and dissipated courses since he came to the province, and by his own account had spent upwards of four thousand pounds in a manner not over-creditable to him.... He was now considerably in debt. Money he had none; and, beyond the dirty fearnought blue seaman's jacket which he wore, a pair of trousers of the coarse cloth of the country, an old black vest that had seen better days, and two blue-checked shirts, clothes he had none. He shaved but once a week, never combed his hair, and never washed himself. A dirtier or more slovenly creature never before was dignified by the title of a gentleman. He was, however, a man of good education, of excellent abilities, and possessed a bitter sarcastic knowledge of the world; but he was selfish and unprincipled in the highest degree."

This piratical sea-bear quarrelled with Mrs Moodie's servants, disgusted and offended her by his ungentlemanly habit of swearing, and behaved altogether so outrageously that any one less forbearing and good-tempered than Captain Moodie would have turned him out of the house before he had been a month in it. But the captain, who lacked not spirit on occasion, had Highland notions of hospitality; and, moreover, he pitied the unhappy scapegrace—whose vile temper was his own greatest curse—and bore with his infirmities. Malcolm got the ague, and poor Mrs Moodie nursed him.

"During the cold fit, he did nothing but swear at the cold, and wished himself roasting; and, during the fever, he swore at the heat, and wished that he was sitting in no other garment than his shirt on the north side of an iceberg."

The only trait that somewhat reconciled Mrs Moodie to her rude guest was his affection for one of her children, a merry golden-haired little boy. When left alone with her in the house, he almost frightened her by his strange, sullen stare, and told her stories about wild deeds of bloodshed committed in his privateering days, and was very anxious to read her a manuscript work on South America, for which Murray, he said, had offered him a sum of money, but to which she preferred not listening. At last he got so indolent and insolent that Captain Moodie was roused to anger, sharply reproved him, and ordered him to be gone. But it was not a trifle in the way of rebuke that would drive Malcolm from free bed and board. He walked away for a few hours, and then returned and joined the family party, as if nothing had happened. One day, however, a nickname applied to him by Mrs Moodie's eldest girl put him in a furious passion, and he took himself off for ever, as his entertainers hoped. They were mistaken.

"Two months after, we were taking tea with a neighbour, who lived a mile below us on the small lake. Who should walk in but Mr Malcolm? He greeted us with great warmth, for him; and when we rose to take leave, he rose and walked home by our side. 'Surely the little stumpy man (the name Katie had given him) is not returning to his old quarters?' I am still a babe in the affairs of men. Human nature has more strange varieties than any one menagerie can contain, and Malcolm was one of the oddest of her odd species. That night he slept in his old bed below the parlour window, and for three months afterwards he stuck to us like a beaver."

The manner of this strange being's final departure was as eccentric as that of his first coming. On Christmas eve he started after breakfast to walk into Peterborough to fetch raisins for next day's pudding. He never came back, but left Peterborough the same day with a stranger in a waggon. It was afterwards said that he had gone to Texas, and been killed at San Antonio de Bexar. Whatever became of him, he never again was seen in that part of Canada. Mrs Moodie's account of his residence in her house is full of character, and admirable for its quietness and truth to nature. "Firing the Fallow," and "Our Logging Bee," are also, apart from their connection with the emigrant's fortunes, striking and interesting sketches of Canadian forest life. We are unable to dwell upon or extract from them, and must hasten to conclude our notice of this really fascinating book.

Rebellion broke out in Canada. Captain Moodie, although suffering from a severe accident he had met with whilst ploughing, felt his loyalty and soldiership irresistibly appealed to by the Queen's proclamation, calling upon all loyal gentlemen to join in suppressing the insurrection. Toronto was threatened by the insurgents, and armed bands were gathering on all sides for its relief. So Captain Moodie marched to the front. Regiments of militia were formed, and in one of them he received command of a company. He left in January, and Mrs Moodie remained alone with her children and Jenny—a faithful old Irish servant—to take care of the house. It was a dull and cheerless time. And yet her husband's appointment was a great boon and relief. His full pay as captain enabled him to remit money home, and to liquidate debts. His wife, on her side, was not inactive.

"Just at this period," she says, "I received a letter from a gentleman, requesting me to write for a magazine (the Literary Garland) just started in Montreal, with promise to remunerate me for my labours. Such an application was like a gleam of light springing up in the darkness."

When the day's toils—which were not trifling—were over, she robbed herself of sleep—which she greatly needed—to labour with her pen; writing by the light of what Irish Jenny called "sluts"—twisted rags, dipped in lard, and stuck in a bottle. Jenny viewed these literary pursuits with huge discontent.

"You were thin enough before you took to the pen," grumbled the affectionate old creature—"what good will it be to the children, dear heart! if you die afore your time by wasting your strength afther that fashion?"

But Mrs Moodie was not to be dissuaded from her new pursuit. She persevered, and with satisfactory results.

"I actually," she says, "shed tears of joy over the first twenty-dollar note I received from Montreal."

Emulous of her mistress's activity, Jenny undertook to make "a good lump" of maple-sugar, with the aid of little Sol, a hired-boy, whom she grievously cuffed and ill-treated, when he upset the kettle, or committed other blunders. Every evening during the sugar-making Mrs Moodie ran up to see Jenny in the bush, singing and boiling down the sap in front of her little shanty.

"The old woman was in her element, and afraid of nothing under the stars; she slept beside her kettles at night, and snapped her fingers at the idea of the least danger."

The sugar-making was a hot and wearisome occupation, but the result was a good store of sugar, molasses, and vinegar.

"Besides gaining a little money with my pen," writes Mrs Moodie at about this time, "I practised a method of painting birds and butterflies upon the white velvety surface of the large fungi that grow plentifully upon the bark of the sugar maple. These had an attractive appearance; and my brother, who was a captain in one of the provisional regiments, sold a great many of them among the officers, without saying by whom they were painted. One rich lady in Peterborough, long since dead, ordered two dozen to send as curiosities to England. These, at one shilling each, enabled me to buy shoes for the children, who, during our bad times, had been forced to dispense with these necessary coverings. How often, during the winter season, have I wept over their little chapped feet, literally washing them with my tears. But these days were to end. Providence was doing great things for us; and Hope raised at last her drooping head, to regard, with a brighter glance, the far-off future. Slowly the winter rolled away; but he to whom every thought was turned, was still distant from his humble home. The receipt of an occasional letter from him was my only solace during his long absence, and we were still too poor to indulge often in the luxury."

The spring brought work. Corn and potatoes must be planted, and the garden dug and manured. By lending her oxen to a neighbour who had none, Mrs Moodie obtained a little assistance; but most of the labour was performed by her and Jenny, the greatest jewel of an old woman the Emerald Isle ever sent forth to toil in American wildernesses. A short visit from the captain cheered the family. In the autumn, he expected, the regiment to which he belonged would be reduced. This was a melancholy anticipation, and his wife again beheld cruel poverty seated on their threshold. After her husband's departure, the thought struck her that she would write to the Governor of Canada, plainly stating her circumstances, and asking him to retain Captain Moodie in the militia service. She knew nothing of Sir George Arthur, and received no reply to her application. But the Governor acted, though he did not write, and acted kindly and generously. "The 16th of October my third son was born; and a few days after, my husband was appointed paymaster to the militia regiments in the V—— district, with the rank and full pay of captain." The appointment was not likely to be permanent, and Mrs Moodie and the children remained at their log-cabin in the woods during the ensuing winter. Malignant scarlet fever attacked the whole family; a doctor was sent for, but did not come; Mrs Moodie, herself ill, had to tend her five children; and when these recovered, she was stretched for many weeks upon a bed of sickness. Jenny, the most attached of humble friends, and a greater heroine in her way than many whom poets have sung and historians lauded, alone kept her suffering mistress company in the depths of the dark forest.

"Men could not be procured in that thinly-settled spot for love nor money; and I now fully realised the extent of Jenny's usefulness. Daily she yoked the oxen, and brought down from the bush fuel to maintain our fires, which she felled and chopped up with her own hands. She fed the cattle, and kept all things snug about the doors; not forgetting to load her master's two guns, 'in case,' as she said, 'the ribels should attack us in our retrate.'"

What says the quaint old song? that—

"The poor man alone, when he hears the poor moan,
Of his morsel a morsel will give,
Well-a-day!"

It were a libel to adopt the sentiment to its full extent, when we witness the large measure of charity which the more prosperous classes in this country are ever ready to dispense to the poor and suffering. But doubtless the sympathy with distress is apt to be heartiest and warmest on the part of those who themselves have experienced the woes they witness. It is very touching to contemplate Mrs Moodie walking twenty miles through a bleak forest—the ground covered with snow, and the thermometer far below zero—to minister to the necessities of one whose sufferings were greater even than her own. Still more touching is the exquisite delicacy with which she and her friend Emilia imparted the relief they brought, and strove to bestow their charity without imposing an obligation. "The Walk to Dummer" is a chapter of Mrs Moodie's book that alone would secure her the esteem and admiration of her readers. Captain N. was an Irish settler in Canada, who had encountered similar mishaps to those Captain Moodie had experienced—but in a very different spirit. He had taken to drinking, had deserted his family, and was supposed to have joined Mackenzie's band of ruffians on Navy Island. For nine weeks his wife and children had tasted no food but potatoes; for eighteen months they had eaten no meat. Before going to Mrs Moodie, Jenny had been their servant for five years, and, although repeatedly beaten by her master with the iron ramrod of his gun, would still have remained with them, would he have permitted her. She sobbed bitterly on learning their sufferings, and that Miss Mary, "the tinder thing," and her brother, a boy of twelve, had to fetch fuel from the bush in that "oncommon savare weather." Mrs Moodie was deeply affected at the recital of so much misery. She had bread for herself and children, and that was all. It was more than had Mrs N. But for the willing there is ever a way, and Mrs Moodie found means of doing good, where means there seemed to be none. Some ladies in the neighbourhood were desirous to do what they could for Mrs N.; but they wished first to be assured that her condition really was as represented. They would be guided by the report of Mrs Moodie and Emilia, if those two ladies would go to Dummer, the most western clearing of Canada's Far West, and ascertain the facts of the case. If they would! There was not an instant's hesitation. Joyfully they started on their Samaritan pilgrimage. Ladies, lounging on damask cushions in your well-hung carriages, read this account of a walk through the wilderness; read the twelfth chapter of Mrs Moodie's second volume, and—having read it—you will assuredly read the whole of her book, and rise from its perusal with full hearts, and with the resolution to imitate, as far as your opportunities allow—and to none of us, who seek them with a fervent and sincere spirit, shall opportunities be wanting—her energetic and truly Christian charity.

Le diable ne sera pas toujours derrière la porte, says the French proverb. The gentleman in question had long obstinately kept his station behind Mrs Moodie's shanty door; but at last, despairing, doubtless, of a triumph over her courage and resignation, he fled, discomfited. The militia disbanded, Captain Moodie's services were no longer needed. But his hard-saved pay had cleared off many debts, and prospects were brighter.

"The potato crop was gathered in, and I had collected my store of dandelion roots for our winter supply of coffee, when one day brought a letter to my husband from the Governor's secretary, offering him the situation of Sheriff of the V—— district. Once more he bade us farewell; but it was to go and make ready a home for us, that we should no more be separated from each other. Heartily did I return thanks to God that night for all his mercies to us."

Short time sufficed for preparation to quit the dreary log-house. Crops, furniture, farm-stock, and implements, were sold, and as soon as snow fell and sleighing was practicable, the family left the forest for their snug dwelling in the distant town of V——. Strange as it may seem, when the time came, Mrs Moodie clung to her solitude.

"I did not like," she says, "to be dragged from it to mingle in gay scenes, in a busy town, and with gaily-dressed people. I was no longer fit for the world; I had lost all relish for the pursuits and pleasures which are so essential to its votaries; I was contented to live and die in obscurity. For seven years I had lived out of the world altogether; my person had been rendered coarse by hard work and exposure to the weather. I looked double the age I really was, and my hair was already thickly sprinkled with grey."

Honour to such grey hairs, blanched in patient and courageous suffering. More lovely they than raven tresses, to all who prefer to the body's perishable beauty, the imperishable qualities of the immortal soul!

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[FAREWELL TO THE RHINE.]