out falsehood or folly; but we can, in the sincerity of our hearts, swear to do faithfully everything in our power to preserve our love. Indissoluble ties we ought not to accept; for if we should always love each other, of what use are they? and if not, our chains are then only an instrument of odious tyranny. Is it not so, my friend?'

'Djalma did not reply; but with a respectful gesture he signed to the young girl to continue.

"And, in fine,' resumed she, with a mixture of tenderness and pride, 'from respect to your dignity as well as my own, I would never promise to observe a law made by man against woman with brutal selfishness, a law which seems to deny to woman mind, soul, and heart,

a law which she cannot obey without being a slave or a perjurer,-s law which deprives her of her maiden name, and declares her, as a wife, in a state of incurable imbecility, by subjecting her to a degrading state of tutelage; as a mother, refuses her all right and power over her children; and as a human being, subjects her son even to the will and pleasure of another human being, who is only her equal in the sight of God. You know how I honour your noble and valiant heart; I am not therefore afraid of seeing you employ those tyrannical privileges against me; but I have never been guilty of falsehood in my life, and our love is too holy, too pure, to be subjected to a consecration which must be purchased by a double perjury.'"

Such are the principles of this Parisian heroine, and such are some of the plausibilities with which she defends them. There are two other female characters in the work, twin sisters, of great beauty, whom the Jesuits also succeed in destroying; and they, too, are devoid of religion. Unlike Adrienne, however, they are not intellectually infidel,—they have simply never heard of Christianity; and when they pray, it is to their deceased mother. Yet another of the female characters, a poor sempstress, possessed, however, of a cultivated mind and a noble heart, finds no time to attend to the duties of religion; and when, through the machinations of the Jesuits, she becomes destitute and wretched, she proposes to go out of the world by her own act, as convinced that she is in the right in doing so as if, wearied and overcome by sleep, she had prepared to go to bed. She is joined in her purpose of death by her sister; and the scene throws light on the acts

of social suicide so common in France, and of which we have had a few instances of late years in our own country.

"The sisters embraced each other for some minutes amid a profound and solemn silence.

""O heavens,' cried Cephysi, 'how cruel, to love each other thus, and be compelled to part for ever!'

"To part!' exclaimed the Mayeux, while her pale face was suddenly lighted up with a ray of divine hope;-To part! Oh no, sister, no: what makes me so calm is, that I feel certain we are going to another world, where a happier life awaits us. Come, hasten; come where God reigns alone, and where man, who on this earth brings about the misery and despair of his fellow-creatures, is nothing. Come, let us depart quickly, for it is late.'

"The sisters having laid the charcoal ready for lighting, proceeded with incredible self-possession to stop up the chinks in the door and windows; and during this sinister operation, the calmness and mournful resignation of these two unfortunate beings did not once forsake them."

We had intended referring to several other points in this mischievous work of fiction, which at once serves to exhibit the opinions entertained by no inconsiderable proportion of the anti-Jesuit party on the Continent, and to spread these opinions more widely. Wherever we find the devotional feeling introduced, some disaster is sure always to follow. One of the best characters in the novel is a highly intellectual and generous manufacturer, more bent on ministering to the happiness of his workmen than on the accumulation of gain. He provides them with comfortable dwellings, extends their leisure hours, gives them a share in the profits of his trade, conducts his manufactory, in short, on the model of the philanthropic economist; and all this when he is an avowed Free-thinker; but, falling into bad health, and meeting with a crushing disappointment, he becomes a devotee, loses all his interest in the welfare of his workmen, becomes enfeebled in body and mind, and the Jesuits ruin him. The wife of a brave and faithful soldier, a thoroughly excellent man, but devoid of all sense of religion, has also the misfor

tune, though a very honest and good sort of person, to be devout; and the weakness, like the dead-fly in the apothecary's ointment, imparts a dangerous taint to the whole character. And thus the lesson of the tale runs on. We see in it the secret of the hostility entertained to evangelism by the insurgents of Vaud and Argovia, and which rendered them not less tolerant of a vital Protestantism than even the Jesuits whom they so determinedly opposed. We see in it, too, the grand error of Voltaire repeated,―miserable attempts to create a blank where, in the nature of things, no blank can exist; and an utter ignorance of the great fact, that the religion of the New Testament is the only efficient antidote against superstition, and a widely-circulated Bible the sole permanent protection against the encroachments of an ambitious priesthood. It would be bold to conjecture what the rising crop of opinion, so thickly sown over Europe, is ultimately to produce. There exists a widely-extended belief that Popery, when its final day has come, is to have infidelity for its executioner. Do we see in works such as those of Eugene Sue the executioner in training? Or is the old cycle again to revolve, and the blank formed by infidelity to be filled up by superstition? We would fain see a safer exposé of the Jesuits than the fiction of the insidious novelist,—an exposé at once so just to the order, that they could raise no effectual protest against it, and so true to the interests of religion and the nature of man, that it could contain no elements of re-action favourable to the body it assailed. When are we to have a translation of the "Provincial Letters" at once worthy of Pascal and of the existing emergency October 18, 1855.

THE ABBOTSFORD BARONETCY.

THE intimation in our last of the death of Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Walter Scott, and the extinction of the Abbotsford baronetcy, must have set not a few of our readers a-thinking. The lesson of withered hopes and blighted prospects which it reads is, sure enough, a common one,-a lesson for everyday perusal in the school of experience, and which the history of every day varies with new instances. But in this special case it reads with more than the usual emphasis. The literary celebrity of the great poet and novelist of Scotland, the intimate knowledge of his personal history which that celebrity has induced, and which exists co-extensive with the study of letters, the consequent acquaintance with the prominent foible that stood out in such high relief in his character from the general groundwork of shrewd good sense and right feeling, have all conspired to set the lesson, as it were, in a sort of illuminated framework. Sir Walter says of Gawin Douglas,-in his picture of the "noble lord of Douglas blood," whose allegorical poem may still be perused with pleasure, notwithstanding the veil of obsolete language which mars its sentiment and obscures its imagery,—that it "pleased him more,"

"that in a barbarous age

He gave rude Scotland Virgil's page,
Than that beneath his rule he held
The bishoprick of fair Dunkeld."

Not such, however, was the principle on which Sir Walter estimated his own achievements or prospects. It pleased him more to contemplate himself in the character of the founder, as seemed likely, of a third-rate border family,-of importance enough, however, to occupy its annual line in the

Almanac,-than that his name should be known as widely as even Virgil's own. And the ambition was one to which he sacrificed health, and leisure, and peace of mind, with probably a few years of life itself, and undoubtedly the very wealth which for this cause alone he so anxiously strove to realize. Never was there one who valued money less for its own sake; but it flowed in upon him; and, save for his haste to be rich that he might be a landholder on his family's behalf, Sir Walter would have died a man of large fortune, quite able to purchase three such properties as that of Abbotsford. And in last week's obituary we see the close of all he had toiled and suffered for, in the extinction of the family in which he had so fondly hoped to live for hundreds of years. One is reminded by the incident of some of the more melancholy strokes in his own magnificent fictions. He describes, for instance, in the introduction to the " Monastery," a weather-wasted stone fixed high in the wall of an ancient ecclesiastical edifice, and bearing a coat-of-arms which no one for ages before had been able to decipher. Weathered as it was, however, it was all that remained to testify of the stout Sir Halbert Glendinning, who had so bravely fought his way to a knighthood and the possession of broad lands, but whose wealth and honours, won solely by himself, he had failed to transmit to other generations, and whose extinct race and name had been lost in the tomb for centuries. Henceforth the honours of the Abbotsford baronetcy will be exhibited on but a hatchment whitened with the painted tears of the herald. A sepulchral tablet in Dryburgh Abbey will form, if not their only record, as in the imaginary case of the knight of Glendinning, at least their most striking memorial.

It is a curious enough fact, that Shakspeare, like Sir Walter Scott, cherished the ambition of being the founder of a family. "All his real estate," says one of his later biographers-Mr C. Knight-" was devised to his daughter,