face with my heart full of revenge: but so it was,-the courage with which he led on his company struck me with no admiration; the probability of my being myself hit never occurred to me. Vengeance for my sister, vengeance for myself; to that eager yearning the destinies of nations, the lives of thousands, the fate of my comrades, were but accessory and immaterial. I was glad when the shells, bursting over our regiment as it waded through the brook, threw it into confusion; for confusion was what I wanted. I cheered for joy when the line, broken into a mob by grape, surged back from the Russian batteries; for then I found my opportunity. Through all the fire, smoke, blood, and confusion, I had never lost sight of him, and I rejoiced to see that he was still uninjured, as I raised my musket, and carefully sighted him between the shoulders. I pressed the trigger: he threw up his arms, and fell on his face-dead. I ought to have felt remorse when the deed was done, I suppose, but I did not. That day and afterwards I shot many an inoffensive Russian in the public quarrel, and one life seemed a small matter on my own private account. Even now that I wish to repent and forgive, I do not feel remorse. No one suspected me; on the contrary, I gained great credit for my behaviour that day, and at Inkermann, where I was wounded. The cloud of my life seemed to have passed away now that my enemy was dead, and I once more rose to be sergeant. When the war was over, we went to India, and there I got a ball through the lungs, was invalided, pensioned, and here I am, dying in my bed, not at the end of a rope.

Sonnet.

COME here before me in thy common dress-
Not clad in vain and delicate deceits

Of ladies' wearing; not a single tress

Loosed from thy wimple: let the rustic sweets
Of thy pure breath flow toward me, like a field

Of beans in bloom, whose fragrance, suddenly
Borne o'er the hawthorn hedge, doth ever yield
Contentment to the homely passer-by:

So me thou charmest-but to me alone
Art fragrant, being utterly mine own;

Bought with no price, but of thine own free will
Content to kneel, and proud to be a slave,

So I would cherish and would love thee still:
Shall I not love thee, whom thy girlhood gave

VOL. III.

Undoubting to my arms, and with such eyes
As Eve unclosed, that morn in Paradise?

A. J. M.

I I

With Mr. Gorilla's Compliments.

My family having been grossly scandalised for many years by persons none of whom can boast the honour of even a personal acquaintance with us, and by far the majority of those who talk so very loudly about our affairs, and the way we manage matters on the Gaboon, never having set eyes on us, or even been within a hundred miles of the country, I naturally feel it incumbent upon me to set the great Gorilla nation right with humanity generally. My attention has been called more especially to the absurd stories recently told by a Frenchman, who knows just as much about us as his countrymen do of their neighbours across the English Channel. I have read a Frenchman's account of how the English live on raw meat, and drink nothing but a dark mixture of tobacco-juice and treacle, which they call "porter;" and how all the members of the Jocky Club always go to evening parties in top-boots, spurs, and red coats; but we don't believe this any more than we do the stories we have heard from English sailors about Frenchmen living upon frogs and coffee. Then, let me beg you will not believe all that this wonderful traveller tells you, for we don't know him, and all that he knows of us and our habits he has picked up in his gossipings with the dirty black niggers,-a set of people who have always been trying to curry favour with you, and would be certain never to let an opportunity slip for lowering us, who are as good blood as them any day. They happen to have got taken up by the upper classes, who only despise them in their hearts; and with this they are so tossed up with pride, that they are ready to cut the throats of all their poorer relations. They say we drag them down; they forget that we are of the old stock of Primates, and that if it hadn't been for some of us, as your great philosopher Mr. Darwin will tell you, there would have been no Bushmen; and if there had been no Bushmen, there would have been no Negroes; and I should like to know where all you white people would have been if there had been no Negroes? Why, Adam was a man of colour, as you know. He was made of red earth, and took his name accordingly; he was no doubt a copper-coloured primate. Then there came Esau, his near descendant; he was a hairy man. And as to that, why, if our upper ten thousand, the Chimpanzees, who, we admit, have more brains than we have, and only want education to become quite equal to many men, had not taught your ancestors that two hands were quite enough for a man, and that the other two might be better employed in walking, who knows but your lot would have been cast in with ours? Let me remind you of what the Negroes are well aware of, and which makes them so spiteful against us, we are a silent race; we know better than expose ourselves as some people do; we rarely utter a word, when we do it is forcible and to the point; but we think a great deal. We have our opinions, and amongst ourselves, in private society, there is, I assure you, no lack of

conversation.

We know very well that Nature never makes a leap, and we have watched the best of you crawling on all fours just as our children do, and with no better notions of helping themselves than ours; indeed, I suspect not quite as good, for our youngsters at three years old are turned out into the world, able to get a living and fight their own battles. Every thing must have a beginning, and the greatest men have sprung sometimes from very humble stock. There is a story, which was told amongst us with great glee, about your famous Alexandre Dumas, -a man of colour in more senses than one-it was this. An impertinent fellow, as it might be, one of our nigger acquaintances, questioned him of his family, his father, his grandfather, and so on, when Dumas (as my French is rather rusty, I tell it in English), getting angry, replied to his question,-"But your great-grandfather ?"—" Ah, I don't know; perhaps he was an ape, in which case my ancestry begins where yours ends." We are naturally proud of this; we accept the compliment from so distinguished a member of the family, though we all felt for our nearer relative, who thus got snubbed for not having made the best of the advantages of cultivation,a disability under which Troglodytes suffer as well as the genus Homo. As to ancestry, we have our traditions. The same country which we hold now was inhabited by our forefathers for many centuries,—I may say, without vain boasting, for ages. We are disposed now, as we were in ancient times, to defend our home against invaders. We have a place in the history of the ancients, as you may be aware from a rare record by one Hanno, a Carthaginian navigator or admiral, preserved, it is said, in your University of Oxford. According to our traditions, these first explorers of your kind known to us sailed up a river and landed upon an island then in our possession. Our people fled, making a brave attempt None of the men fell into the hands of enemy; but the women, not being so well able to run, three of them were taken prisoners and were carried away.

at defence by throwing stones.

the

γορίλλας.

[Referring to Hanno's account, we find he says that after sailing three days up a river, they came to a gulf with an island, on which they landed, and saw many wild hairy men,-v0рwo άypioi,-and women also covered with hair; the native interpreters they had with them called these creatures yopiλλaç. They tried to catch them, but the men escaped, being as nimble as rope-walkers-крεμvоßároι övтes; they caught hold of trees and rocks, and defended themselves by throwing stones as they ran. Three women, however, were caught; but they bit and scratched so, that they were obliged to kill them. Their skins were carried as trophies to Carthage, and there placed in the Temple of Juno. These skins are also distinctly proved to have been placed in this temple by the reference of Pliny to them. He, however, mystifies the matter by substituting the name Gorgones for Gorillas; but his words are, "Penetravit in eas

* Αννωνος Περίπλους. Oxon. 1698.-ED. T. B.

Geographia Veteri Scriptores Græci Minores, vol. i.

(Gorgades Insulas) Hanno Pœnorum imperator, prodiditque hirta fœminarum corpora duarumque Gorgonum cutes argumenti et miraculi gratia in Junonis templo posuit spectatas, usque ad Carthaginem captam." These skins were seen there at the taking of Carthage by the Romans. It was about 500 years B.c. that Hanno was chosen, with Himilco, by the Carthaginians, when at the height of their prosperity, to explore neighbouring countries and to establish colonies. Himilco sailed towards Europe; but Hanno passed the columns of Hercules (Gibraltar) with his fleet of sixty ships, carrying three thousand men, women, and children; and though some geographers think he never got beyond Cape Blanco, others think he reached Senegal and Guinea; while M. Dureau de la Malle, who has especially studied the antiquity of the Gorilla, considers that the animals having been seen by Hanno, and the name so decidedly recorded, is a proof that the Gaboon was reached. M. Geoffroy St. Hilaire thinks the hairy people must have been Chimpanzees, as they would be found near the coast, while the Gorilla is an inhabitant of the inland forests, and is too fierce and courageous to run away. The name, remarkable as it is in its antiquity, says little; it has of course only been revived by Mr. Savage, and may have been applied by Hanno to the smaller animal.]

If you Caucasians,-I say nothing of Bushmen, Negroes, Esquimaux, and people of that sort,-pique yourselves upon being descended from old families, as we know that you do, you must allow that we have the advantage of you. What, indeed, are all the classic allusions of your poets to PAN, the spirit of Nature, and his race of sylvan deities, but a confession of our being the true type of the natural man? And does not the taste of the best of you for hunting and leading a wild life in the woods betray our common ancestry? Do you not make rather a boast that the instincts of the savage crop out in your most cultivated societies, showing itself now in a prize-fight, then in fashionable views about muscular Christianity? We have no battles; we don't murder one another; we don't even eat up our enemies, as some of you do that I could name. It is a calumny to say, as your travellers often have, that our braves lie in wait for human victims passing through the woods, and seize them by the hair of their heads, dragging them up into trees to be devoured; or that Gorillas have ever used their feet in strangling men by seizing them by the neck. Neither is it worth my while to refute those odious stories of our largest and finest Gorillas running away with your women, as your barons of old were so fond of doing, and thought such a very gallant enterprise. I repeat, that we are peaceable natives of the woods, living upon fruit and vegetable food entirely we are not brigands, and we never make a foray upon any thing but sugar-canes. If our monkey is put up, that's quite a different thing; then we can match the bravest of you. It is quite true that most of our tribe whom you have got in your museums, and, I believe, all those procured by this Du Chaillu, were shot in the back they were taken at a disadvantage, and killed in a cowardly

:

manner. M. du Chaillu tells a fine story about his combat with our king, in which he cleverly contrives to add to his own glory by exalting the terrible prowess of his adversary. For our sake, I wish it was true, but for his own it were better he had never related the adventure, for it is all a fudge. None of our tribe have ever yet fought with white men. It is true that a king or chief of ours was some years ago (1855) killed, and his body carried off by some blacks, who sold it to some of your traders; and I believe this noble fellow is now to be seen in the Museum at Vienna. The individual described by M. du Chaillu is quite a commoner; he never would have been chosen by us as a chief,-for we think a great deal of bodily strength: all our heroes have been very tall, strong men; and here again I would remind you that your Hercules and Theseus are evidently borrowed from us. The hero whose remains you exhibit at Vienna stands full six feet six, while the pretended antagonist of M. du Chaillu measures only five feet six. For the last thirty years the black men, who are much more ferocious and cruel than we are, and who, as you know, always eat one another after a fight, because they are too idle to bury their dead, have been trying to kidnap our tribe to sell us for slaves. This cruel practice they have learnt from you white people; and when they cannot catch us alive, they are mean enough to sell our dead bodies, or even our skins and bones, for trifling sums. We are aware that in this way have been obtained those of our nation who are in the Paris Museum, at Brussels, at Leyden, the individual who was shown at Havre (in 1836), and another at Boston, America (in 1847). Ngina, a noted Gorilla chief of ours, was in this way killed, and sold, after he had been hawked about by those rascally niggers, to Dr. Franquet; and the French Admiral Penaud was good enough to give him a barrel of spirits and stuff to preserve the body. This was in 1852; and it was certainly a melancholy satisfaction to his relatives on the Gaboon to know that Ngina, the first of our race taken in the flesh,—for all the others you got were only skins, was received with profound respect and consideration at the great Exposition Universelle of 1855. Here, indeed, Ngina was under the especial protection of M. Geoffroy St. Hilaire, to whom our tribe owes an everlasting debt of gratitude for his constant endeavours to raise the condition and merits of Troglodytes in general. The Paris public also testified their regard for our race by the avidity with which they purchased a very admirable statuette portrait, modelled by an eminent sculptor, and under the immediate direction of the great naturalist Geoffroy himself. Speaking of portraits of our family, I beg particularly to say that those exhibited by M. du Chaillu are what you call "dealer's portraits." They are all copies, and very bad ones too. The full-length which forms the frontispiece to his "Adventures" is a mutilated copy from the coloured lithograph by M. Boucourt, which is in the paper by M. Geoffroy St. Hilaire. The portrait of a young Gorilla is also a bad copy from the

*Contributed in 1858 to the Archives du Museum. This specimen measures 1 metre 67,-about 5 feet 6.-ED. T. B.