fatal hour. "Lost, lost; struck on the rocks,-down,—sunk -Good God! the poor boy's mother!" These were cries which, in hurried accents of affright, met my ear on every side, as I stood watching on the shore. Such cries, indeed, first announced to me that all was over, that all earthly hopes of aid were vain. The boat, my unhappy friend, and the presumptuous boy who had undertaken its guidance in such peril, had all sunk together!

I can scarcely tell the rest. The body of Charles Edwards was washed on shore. Mr. Armerage permitted its interment in his family vault, near the coffin of his beloved daughter, where, not very long after these sad events, that unfortunate father was himself laid to rest. Sir Frederick quitted Wales; he became a wanderer on the Continent: his character appeared totally changed by the violent extinction of all his hopes; he was remarked for a solitary and reserved man; no female ever afterwards attracted his attention; he lived till he had completed his forty-eighth year, and died unmarried. Miss Henley was not unprovided for at the death of Mr. Armerage. He left her a small annuity; and with this she retired into a remote part of North Wales. I believe she is yet living, the last and mourning survivor of the once happy family of New Park.

After the death of Edwards, I had the pitiable task of breaking the final issue of this domestic tragedy to his poor mother. She was greatly affected; but, after the first shock, she appeared to bear it with a submission to the divine will, which I should have attributed entirely to her religious feelings, had I not found that her lamented son (whose genius and acquirements had raised her opinion of his judgment to an extravagant degree of admiration) had infused into her mind his own spirit of fatalism, and superstitious credulity. For one day when, in the hope to cheer her solitude, and to shew my sympathy with her sorrows, I called upon her, and indulged her in talking to me of her lost son—she told me mysteriously that Charles was perfectly right in what he said to me at the moment we parted, ere he leapt into the boat. She would trust me on examining his papers left at her house, she had found a note written by him some few years before at Oxford. It was his memorandum of a Prediction which had there been made to him of his future fortunes. The two things especially denounced as fatal to him, he had himself, she fancied (in imitation of some of the ancient prophecies of Wales, that were always in verse) turned into a few rude rhymes—she shewed them to me, they ran thus::

When a bridal bell
Tolls like a knell,
Then the angry sea
Thy grave shall be;
And all on earth
Is closed on thee.

"This, then," said I, "was the cause of his death. A mind in despair is like a mind in madness, it rushes on ruin. Charles Edwards saw the danger of the passage, the insufficiency of the boy, the gathering storm; he rushed on his FATE, and by so doing, himself accomplished the PREDICTION."

THE ORPHANS OF LA VENDÉE.

INTRODUCTION.

IN the year 1818, I first visited some of the most remarkable towns and provinces of France: amongst the latter was La Vendée. La Vendée (formerly the Bocage) has only been known by that name since it acquired such immortal honour during the fearful epocha of the Revolution.

It was with feelings of the deepest interest that I travelled through a considerable part of this most remarkable country -remarkable for its people, its manners, its natural characteristics, and above all, for its heroism. Its history was known to me; and the delightful memoirs of Madame de la Rochejacqueline had excited in my mind that powerful sympathy for herself, and her brave and devoted countrymen, which they can never fail to call forth in every bosom capable of feeling esteem and admiration for all that is good and great.

Take the history of the world, from the earliest ages down to the present times, including the most heroic actions of Greece and Rome, and perhaps none can compete with, certainly none can excel, those to be found in the deathless annals of La Vendée; and when the simplicity of character, the piety, and the morality of the peasantry who performed these deeds of heroic self-devotion are considered, there is something so touching in their story, that to dwell upon their cruel fate, after all their noble struggles in the cause of virtuous freedom, loyalty, and religion, conveys that sense of painful interest to the mind which we experience whilst hearing an account of the calamities that may have befallen our most dear and personal friends. When reading the memoirs of Madame de la Rochejacqueline, I felt, at every page, as if I went along with her through the animating, the fearful scenes she describes. Thus impressed, judge how deep was

the enthusiasm I experienced in visiting those scenes, in making what inquiries I could on the spot relative to the events of the war.

I gleaned much in confirmation of the strict and minute attention paid to truth_by_Madame de la Rochejacqueline; and some information I also gleaned that probably had escaped her. Nor is it wonderful that many things worthy of note, as she herself declares, should have escaped her; since much as she saw, and much as she has described, yet, from her own perilous situation, many circumstances must have passed without her knowledge or possibility of observation. She was constantly harassed and threatened with immediate danger, with death; now following the army; now in concealment or disguise-then in flight-again in the midst of battle; here attending the dying hours of her first husband, Lescure; soon after, without shelter, starving, or in want, seeking to save one poor child, and giving birth to her fatherless twins, at a moment when she had neither home nor place of security, nor even the common necessaries of life to support her under such aggravated circumstances of distress.

As one who visited the Continent void, I hope, of prejudice, and anxious to do justice to all, I feel a pleasure in thus giving my humble, but sincere testimony to the truth of Madame de la Rochejacqueline as a writer, and to her merit as a woman; for never did I hear her name mentioned other than in terms of admiration, affection, and esteem. Her misfortunes, which have scarcely a parallel, gave but greater force to the firmness of her mind, whilst they softened, but did not weaken, her heart. She had all the noble-mindedness of a Madame Roland; and to this was superadded, what Madame Roland grievously wanted, a deep sense of all that is due to female delicacy, both in her writings and her conduct. Such was Madame de la Rochejacqueline-a heroine-the historian of heroism.

When I travelled through La Vendée it was in a fine season, about the close of summer; the trees were in full leaf; the lands in cultivation, or in harvest: all was beauty and peace around me. How different from the spectacle of but a few brief years before, when towns, villages, churches, châteaux, and the whole of the lovely and smiling land of the Bocage was laid waste by fire, sword, and massacre - by all the horrors of the most cruel war- -by all the demoniacal spirit of French republicanism! The hills of the Bocage (at least those that I saw) are truly stated to be of no great height; but they are generally exceedingly picturesque in their forms. I was peculiarly struck with the beauty of many of the smaller

valleys, intersected, as they frequently are, by streams, rivulets, and rocks, and studded with cottages, villages, or farms, with groves and hedge-rows-the whole bearing that appearance of tranquil beauty which is the character of rural scenery of the finest class. There are still left, also, some few examples of noble forest scenery in La Vendée; but I was told that what I saw of this description was nothing compared to what might have been seen before fire and havoc had done their work in the Bocage. My attention was likewise attracted by the extreme picturesque beauty of several of the remains of convents, churches, and châteaux.

But the sight of these was melancholy; for whilst viewing them (as I endeavoured to gain the best information I could wherever I went), I was always roused into painful feelings of indignation at hearing some fearful account of the circumstances which had caused, or accompanied, their destruction. Of far the greater number nothing remained but their ruins; often the ruins of a ruin, in part overgrown with ivy, or tottering with decay for want of timely repair, as the covering of the roofs had often been stript off to supply the army with lead to make bullets; or fire and flame had destroyed their interior, and left them to fall in.

Many of these were objects which, with the feeling of an artist, I should have admired, had I known they were but the ruins of time: but the consciousness that they were the result of the destructive hand of man excites a different feeling. There is not in it the gradual and natural course of things to reconcile us to decay; there is not the moral and softening conviction, that all that is of earth is earthly, and therefore must fall in the fullness of years: but such ruins were alone the consequence of violence, of the worst passions of the worst men; so that I often recoiled from contemplating them, somewhat, though in an inferior degree, as I should have done from the sight of a human being, cut off, not by the immediate will of God, but by the iniquity of man.

How often did I feel the truth of this whilst in France, particularly in La Vendée. In wandering along near the banks of the Loire, where the whole range of the surrounding country was exceedingly beautiful, we once came, I remember, to a château which had undergone such partial repairs as to make it habitable; for since the Bourbon restoration, the royalist family to whom it belonged had again been put in possession of their lost property, though they were too much impoverished to restore it to its former state, the bulk of the château therefore, and a little Gothic chapel near it, still wore the aspect of ruin or neglect.